Ikigai Daily
Menu
StillnessStoic idea

The Stoics drew a sharp line between what is up to us (our own judgements, intentions and choices) and what is not, such as health, wealth, reputation and other people's actions. Peace of mind, they taught, comes from putting our effort into the first.

Philosophy

Philosophy

The story behind the card

Stoicism was founded in Athens around 300 BC by Zeno of Citium, who taught at the Stoa Poikile, the Painted Porch, which gave the school its name. The clearest statement of this line comes from Epictetus (about AD 50–135), who was born enslaved in Hierapolis, today's Pamukkale in Turkey, was later freed, and taught philosophy in Rome and then in Greece. His student Arrian wrote down his teaching, and the Enchiridion, or Handbook, opens with exactly this division. Epictetus did not ask people to stop caring about results, only not to let their peace of mind depend on things they cannot command. Marcus Aurelius drew on him, and in the 20th century Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, pioneers of cognitive behavioural therapy, took up his idea that we are upset less by events than by our judgements about them.

Türkçe oku
Stoacı filozoflar, elimizde olanla olmayanı kesin bir çizgiyle ayırdı. Yargılarımız, niyetlerimiz ve seçimlerimiz elimizdedir; sağlığımız, servetimiz, ünümüz ve başkalarının yaptıkları ise değildir. Onlara göre iç huzurun yolu, çabamızı elimizde olana yöneltmekten geçer.

Stoacılığı MÖ 300 dolaylarında Atina'da Kıbrıslı Zenon kurdu. Zenon derslerini Stoa Poikile'de, yani “Resimli Revak”ta verirdi; okul adını buradan aldı. Bu ayrımı en açık biçimde Epiktetos (yaklaşık MS 50–135) dile getirdi. Epiktetos, bugün Denizli'deki Pamukkale'nin hemen yanında kalan antik Hierapolis kentinde köle olarak doğdu; sonra özgürlüğüne kavuştu, önce Roma'da, ardından Yunanistan'da felsefe öğretti. Öğrencisi Arrianos derslerini yazıya geçirdi; Enkheiridion, yani El Kitabı, tam da bu ayrımla açılır. Epiktetos insanlardan sonuçları önemsememelerini değil, iç huzurlarını ellerinde olmayan şeylere bağlamamalarını istiyordu. Marcus Aurelius ondan beslendi. 20. yüzyılda bilişsel davranışçı terapinin öncüleri Albert Ellis ve Aaron Beck de insanı olaylardan çok, olaylar hakkındaki yargılarının üzdüğü fikrini ondan aldı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Stoicism
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

DrivePhilosophy

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

The saying comes from chapter 64 of the Tao Te Ching, the classic of Taoist philosophy traditionally credited to the sage Laozi; its oldest surviving copies date from around 300 BC. Literally, a journey of a thousand li begins beneath your feet; the li is a Chinese measure of distance, today half a kilometre. The same chapter notes that a tree too thick to hug grows from a tiny shoot: great things start small, and are best dealt with while they are still small.

Chinese, Daoist ProverbRead card
StillnessLiterature

The wound is where the light enters you.

The sentence condenses lines by Coleman Barks, the American poet whose free versions made Rumi a bestseller in English; Barks did not read Persian and reworked scholarly translations. His poem “Childhood Friends” (1990) urges the reader to keep looking at “the bandaged place”, where the light enters. It draws on the Masnavi of Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic of Konya, who tells the wounded not to turn away from the plaster a spiritual guide lays on them: the healing comes from its light, not from themselves.

Attributed to Rumi; exact English sentence not matched to a standard textRead card
DrivePhilosophy

The tongue has no bones, but it can break hearts.

The older form of this proverb says the tongue has no bones, yet it breaks bones: words can hurt as much as blows. An Italian-English dictionary of 1760 gives it as “La lingua non ha osso, e osso fa rompere”; Greek has it too, and the Ottoman statesman and scholar Ahmed Vefik Pasha recorded “Dilin kemiği yok, kemiği kırar” in his 19th-century collection of Turkish proverbs. Swahili says simply “Ulimi hauna mfupa”, the tongue has no bone. The ending about hearts seems to be a later English variant.

Persian, Turkish, Arabic variants ProverbRead card
StillnessLiterature

The rose's lover must endure the thorn.

The Turkish Language Association's dictionary explains that people put up with the troubles that come with someone, or some work, they love. The rose and its thorn are an old pair in Turkish and Persian poetry; in classical Ottoman verse the nightingale longs for the rose, and the thorn often stands for the pain of love. English has “No rose without a thorn”, as does Turkish, “Dikensiz gül olmaz”, but this proverb adds that whoever loves the rose accepts its thorn.

Turkish, Persian variants ProverbRead card
DrivePhilosophy

He who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything.

English quotation books have called this an “Arabian proverb” since at least the 1860s; Tryon Edwards's A Dictionary of Thoughts (1891) is one, but these books give no Arabic original, so the label is best taken loosely. The idea is widely shared: good health gives people the strength to plan and to recover from setbacks. Turkish says “Her şeyin başı sağlık”, health comes first, and when a glass breaks people say “Sağlık olsun”: never mind, as long as everyone is well.

Spanish, Arabic variants ProverbRead card
Next card in the archiveWhen Friedrich Nietzsche wrote 'God is dead' in The Gay Science (1882), he was not celebrating. He meant that belief in God no longer held European culture together, and that the morals built on it would lose their footing too.Read next →