« Another person will not hurt you without your cooperation. You are hurt the moment you believe yourself to be. »
– Epictetus
« How much better to heal than seek revenge from injury. Vengeance wastes a lot of time and exposes you to many more injuries than the first that sparked it. Anger always outlasts hurt. Best to take the opposite course. »
– Seneca
« The greatest remedy for anger is delay. »
– Seneca
« If you want to determine the nature of anything, entrust it to time: when the sea is stormy, you can see nothing clearly. »
– Seneca
« We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality. »
– Seneca
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine.”
– Marcus Aurelius
“When people injure you, ask yourself what good or harm they thought would come of it. If you understand that, you’ll feel sympathy rather than outrage or anger. Your sense of good and evil may be the same as theirs, or near it, in which case you have to excuse them. Or your sense of good and evil may differ from theirs. In which case they’re misguided and deserve your compassion. Is that so hard?”
– Marcus Aurelius
“None of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.”
– Marcus Aurelius
« The best way to avenge yourself is to not be like that. »
– Marcus Aurelius
« An angry man opens his mouth and shuts his eyes. »
— Cato The Elder
