Massimo Pigliucci

It is simply the realization that what is important in life is to live it well,

Life only happens once, and we learn “in the air,” not in a safe environment. To make things even more stressful, we usually have passengers we care a lot about on board too!

we need to develop a life plan. To do this we must take a look at our entire life, make plans, and arrive at decisions “all things considered,” as philosophers say. The idea isn’t the naive one of figuring out what we want to do in life early on and then just implementing the plan, Soviet-style. Rather, Larry suggests making a habit of reflecting on what is important to us and on the best way to achieve it, and also to continuously revise our life plan, according to our changing abilities and circumstances.

what someone says to us is his opinion, which may or may not be grounded in fact. Whether we perceive someone else’s remark as an insult or not is entirely up to us, quite regardless of the intention of our interlocutor.

Seneca wrote about self-knowledge and suggested that sometimes we are the worst obstacles to our own improvement: we see where we should go, which is where we want to go, and yet somehow we can’t pick ourselves up and begin the journey.

” Epictetus added: “Stay where you are, and depart not without reason.”

Logic defeats anger, because anger, even when it’s justified, can quickly become irrational. So use cold hard logic on yourself.”

Life, for the Stoics, is an ongoing project, and death, its logical, natural end point, is nothing special in and of itself and nothing that we should particularly fear.

focus our attention and efforts where we have the most power and then let the universe run as it will.

regret is a waste of our emotional energy. We cannot change the past—it is outside of our control. We can, and should, learn from it, but the only situations we can do something about are those happening here and now.