A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy Quotes.

1. "Indeed, pursuing pleasure, Seneca warns, is like pursuing a wild beast: On being captured, it can turn on us and tear us to pieces. Or, changing the metaphor a bit, he tells us that intense pleasures, when captured by us, become our captors, meaning that the more pleasures a man captures, the more masters will he have to serve."
- William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

2. "Your primary desire, says Epictetus, should be your desire not to be frustrated by forming desires you won’t be able to fulfill."
- William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

3. "pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes."
- William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

4. "By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent."
- William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

5. "We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires."
- William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

6. "Throughout the millennia and across cultures, those who have thought carefully about desire have drawn the conclusion that spending our days working to get whatever it is we find ourselves wanting is unlikely to bring us either happiness or tranquility."
- William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

7. "if we seek social status, we give other people power over us: We have to do things calculated to make them admire us, and we have to refrain from doing things that will trigger their disfavor."
- William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

8. "the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have."
- William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

9. "If you consider yourself a victim, you are not going to have a good life; if, however, you refuse to think of yourself as a victim—if you refuse to let your inner self be conquered by your external circumstances—you are likely to have a good life, no matter what turn your external circumstances take. (In particular, the Stoics thought it possible for a person to retain his tranquility despite being punished for attempting to reform the society in which he lived.)"
- William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

10. "One reason children are capable of joy is because they take almost nothing for granted."
- William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy