Stoic Quotes - Page 3

• courage isn't simply a matter of leading charges: sometimes it consists in speaking up, sometimes in stoic silence, sometimes in forging ahead, sometimes in circumspection, and sometimes in nothing less than preserving our own humanity.

  Elizabeth Samet

  Courage, Speaking Up, Silence

  Elizabeth D. Samet (2007). “Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point”, p.214, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• These?" Mat said, gesturing to his coat and shirt. "I really have no idea. They were just down there. I'm completely baffled." He had been very pleased to learn that Seanchan guards-for all their stoic expressions and too-straight backs-responded to bribes like other people.

  Robert Jordan

  Expression, Ideas, People

  Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson (2013). “A Memory of Light”, p.509, Macmillan

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• The problem a lot of writers have is that they really, really enjoy people saying, "You're brilliant." They let their self-perception be dictated by reader response. But if you're going to let other people make you feel good, you're going to end up feeling bad when they say the opposite. You've got to be a cultural stoic. Then you won't be devastated by people who respond negatively. Of course, the downside is that it sort of stops you from being able to enjoy people liking your work.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Self, Opposites, People

  Interview with Noel Murray, www.avclub.com. November 15, 2006.

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• I think that is also something he [Barack Obama], in the beginning of his presidency, he couldn't really explore and couldn't show. He had to be almost a one-dimensional, stoic leader during that first election.

  Jordan Peele

  Thinking, Leader, Firsts

  Source: www.npr.org

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• I hung out with a lot of the riders to get their attitude and they're all like men. Men among boys. They have a certain calm to them which is really impressive. They go out there and they're racing 80 miles per hour, or jumping 60 foot jumps, I think they get all their adrenaline out. So during the day, they're just quiet, aloof and stoic superheroes kinda, you know what I mean? They're very, very respectful. It's a very family oriented sport. Everybody knows everybody so there's a lot of respect and understanding.

  Steve Howey

  Sports, Attitude, Mean

  Source: www.movieweb.com

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• I'm an atheist, I always thought, 'This is it.' If there is going to be a heaven, it should be on earth. I feel much happier than most people. I'm fairly stoic about death, but I'm not keen on dying if it's going to be long and protracted. I don't have dark nights of the soul, except occasionally. I'm such a little busy bee.

  Edmund White

  Atheist, Dark, Night

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• I'm a really stoic artist. I'm serious a lot of times. I can joke and play sometimes, but most of the time, I'm stoic.

  LeCrae

  Artist, Play, Serious

  Source: www.artistdirect.com

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• Many of us assume that we have to do things a certain way: ignore passion in favor of safer bets, act stoic amid inner turmoil, run on an upward trajectory of success and money acquisition at any emotional cost. But these are not rules.

  Martha Beck

  Running, Monday, Passion

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• He should have said something, why hadn't he? Costis wondered. In fact, the king had. He had complained at every step all the way across the palace, and they'd ignored it. If he'd been stoic and denied the pain, the entire palace would have been in a panic already, Eddisian soldiers on the move. He'd meant to deceive them, and he'd succeeded. It made Costis wonder for the first time just how much the stoic man really wants to hide when he unsuccessfully pretends not to be in pain.

  Megan Whalen Turner

  Kings, Pain, Moving

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• You've got to figure out what works best for you. That's the hard part. I know I can't play as stoic as Hogan, and I can't talk as much as Trevino. You have to be your own person.

  Tiger Woods

  Golf, Play, Figures

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• The best CEOs in our research display tremendous ambition for their company combined with the stoic will to do whatever it takes, no matter how brutal (within the bounds of the company's core values), to make the company great. Yet at the same time they display a remarkable humility about themselves, ascribing much of their own success to luck, discipline and preparation rather than personal genius.

  James C. Collins

  Success, Leadership, Humility

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• A stoic of the woods,--a man without a tear.

  Thomas Campbell

  Men, Tears, Woods

  Thomas Campbell, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Gray (1872). “The Poetical Works of Campbell, Goldsmith and Gray: With Memoirs of the Authors”, p.96

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• Not the least of the problems in clarifying one's consciousness is developing the stoic determination to criticize one's own softness or sentimentality toward oneself. Ego, self-solicitous about its own tenderness, is the ultimate policeman over its own false consciousness, dementedly uprooting every healthy seedling of insight into the truth. As Kierkegaard remarked, most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, but the real trick and task of life is to learn to be just the very opposite.

  Kenny Smith

  Life, Determination, Truth

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• A bleak, black book, it engenders awe and despair. I have read it in its entirety 4 1/2 times, each time finding its resonance and beauty so great as to demand another reading. As I read, I found myself devastated by the thoroughness of the book's annihilating sensibility and revived by the beauty of its language, the complexity of its design, the melancholy, horror and stoic sympathy in its rendering of what we used to call the human condition.

  Michael Silverblatt

  Reading, Book, Design

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• My childhood was very difficult. I had every childhood disease and then some, but my parents didnt mollycoddle me. They left me to fight those battles on my own. I guess that was very Canadian, very stoic. But its good. I had to become a warrior. I had to give up hope and find a substitute for hope that would be far more stable.

  Joni Mitchell

  Giving Up, Fighting, Warrior

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• When I think of Britain, I don't think of these lofty ideals which once held sway like the stoic upper lip. I think of girls on a Saturday night outside kebab shops stabbing each other with stiletto heels or guys smashing glasses into someone's face. I think of shows like Big Brother which celebrate people's discomfort and anguish or kids committing these terrifying happy slapping acts of brutality to each other at the drop of a hat.

  Kele Okereke

  Girl, Brother, Kids

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• Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.

  H. L. Mencken

  Strong, Fighting, Fate

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.160, Vintage

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• Every stoic was a stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Christian, Christendom

  1841 Essays: First Series,'Self-Reliance'.

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• Now, as never before, hundreds of millions of men and women-who had formerly believed that stoic resignation in the face of hunger and disease and darkness was the best one could could do-have come alive with a new sense that the means are at hand with which to make for themselves a better life.

  John F. Kennedy

  Mean, Men, Hands

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• God expects you to have enough faith and determination and enough trust in Him to keep moving, keep living, keep rejoicing. In fact, He expects you not simply to face the future (that sounds pretty grim and stoic); He expects you to embrace and shape the future--to love it and rejoice in it and delight in your opportunities. God is anxiously waiting for the chance to answer your prayers and fulfill your dreams, just as He always has. But He can't if you don't pray, and He can't if you don't dream. In short, He can't if you don't believe.

  Jeffrey R. Holland

  Dream, Determination, Prayer

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• Die - you will have to die. But die gracefully. I am not saying die like a stoic, I am not saying die like a very controlled man. No, I'm saying die gracefully, beautifully, as if a friend is coming, knocks at your door, and you are happy. And you embrace the friend and invite him in, and you have been waiting for him so long.

  Rajneesh

  Men, Doors, Self

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• Socrates was the chief saint of the Stoics throughout their history ; his attitude at the time of his trial, his refusal to escape, his calmness in the face of death , and his contention that the perpetrator of injustice injures himself more than his victim, all fitted in perfectly with Stoic teaching. So did his indifference to heat and cold, his plainness in matters of food and dress, and his complete independence of all bodily comforts.

  Bertrand Russell

  Attitude, Teaching, Independence

  Bertrand Russell (2008). “History of Western Philosophy”, p.253, Simon and Schuster

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• The main thing was finding this... voice that I had interest in, which I'll call the quiet-yet-stoic voice: the very quiet yet very strong voice that I developed, that people would want to hear and that was worth paying attention to.

  Gillian Welch

  Strong, Voice, People

  "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. July 18, 2011.

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• So-called austerity, the stoic injunction, is the path towards universal destruction. It is the old, the fatal, competitive path. Pull in your belt is a slogan closely related to gird up your loins, or the guns-butter metaphor.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Gun, Austerity, Path

  Wyndham Lewis (1989). “The Essential Wyndham Lewis: An Introduction to His Work”, Andre Deutsch Limited

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• CALLOUS, adj. Gifted with great fortitude to bear the evils afflicting another. When Zeno was told that one of his enemies was no more he was observed to be deeply moved. "What!" said one of his disciples, "you weep at the death of an enemy?" "Ah, 'tis true," replied the great Stoic; "but you should see me smile at the death of a friend.".

  Ambrose Bierce

  Evil, Death Of A Friend, Enemy

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.31, University of Georgia Press

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