"A Guide to the Good Life" by William B. Irvine

• A grand goal in living is the first component of a philosophy of life.
• The second component of a philosophy of life is a strategy for attaining your grand goal in living.
• One wonderful way to tame our tendency to always want more is to persuade ourselves to want the things we already have.
• Although much has changed in the past two millennia, human psychology has changed little. This is why those of us living in the twenty-first century can benefit from the advice that philosophers such as Seneca offered to first-century Romans.
• Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness--all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.
• 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.
• The easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.
• We should live as if this very moment were our last.
• As we go about our day, we should periodically pause to reflect on the fact that we will not live forever and therefore that this day could be our last.
• And besides contemplating the loss of our life we should contemplate the loss of our possessions.
• Most of us spend our idle moments thinking about the things we want but don’t have.
• The practice of negative visualization can take some of the sting out of having nothing and thereby make those who have nothing less miserable than they would otherwise be.
• One reason children are capable of joy is because they take almost nothing for granted. To them, the world is wonderfully new and surprising.
• 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.
• A better strategy for getting what you want is to make it your goal to want only those things that are easy to obtain--and ideally to want only those things that you can be certain of obtaining.
• Some things are up to us and some are not up to us.
• There are things over which we have complete control, things over which we have no control at all, and things over which we have some but not complete control. Each of the “things” we encounter in life will fall into one and only of these three categories.
• If something is truly an impulse, we can’t preclude experiencing it.
• If we want our life to go well, we should, rather than wanting events to conform to our desires, make our desires conform to events; we should, in other words, want events “to happen as they do happen”.
• Besides contemplating bad things happening, we should sometimes live as if they had happened.
• What Stoics discover is that willpower is like muscle power: The more they exercise their muscles, the stronger they get, and the more they exercise their will, the stronger it gets.
• By practicing Stoic self-denial techniques over a long period, Stoics can transform themselves into individuals remarkable for their courage and self-control.
• Another sign of progress in our practice of Stoicism is that our philosophy will consist of actions rather than words. What matters most is not our ability to spout Stoic principles but our ability to live in accordance with them.
• The most important sign that we are making progress as Stoic is a change in our emotional life. We will find ourselves experiencing fewer negative emotions. We will also find that we are spending less time than we used to wishing things could be different and more time enjoying things as they are.
• Our primary function is to be rational. To discover our secondary functions, we need only apply our reasoning ability. What we will discover is that we were designed to live among other people and interact with them in a manner that is mutually advantageous.
• Vices are contagious: They spread, quickly and unnoticed, from those who have them to those with whom they come into contact.
• Besides advising us to avoid people with vices, Seneca advises us to avoid people who are simply whiny, “who are melancholy and bewail everything, who find pleasure in every opportunity for complaint.”
• When we find ourselves irritated by someone's shortcoming, we should pause to reflect on our own shortcomings. Doing this will help us become more empathetic to this individual’s faults and therefore become more tolerant of him.
• One of the best forms of revenge on another person is to refuse to be like him.
• If we analyze something into the elements that compose it, we will see the thing for what it really is and thereby value it appropriately.
• Refusing to respond to an insult is, paradoxically, one of the most effective responses possible.
• The Stoics primary grief-prevention strategy was to engage in negative visualization. By contemplating the deaths of those we love, we will remove some of the shock we experience if they die; we will in a sense have seen it coming. Furthermore, if we contemplate the deaths of those we love, we will likely take full advantage of our relationships with them and therefore won’t, if they die, find ourselves filled with regrets about all the things we could and should have done with and for them.
• In normal, prospective negative visualization, we imagine losing something we currently possess; in retrospective negative visualization, we imagine never having had something that we have lost. By engaging in retrospective negative visualization, we can replace our feelings of regret at having lost something with feelings of thanks for once having had it.
• We need to keep in mind that just because things don’t turn out the way we want them to, it doesn’t follow that someone has done us an injustice.
• To avoid becoming angry we should also keep in mind that the things that anger us generally don’t do us any real harm; they are instead mere annoyances.
• What fools we are when we allow our tranquility to be disrupted by minor things.
• Our goal should be to become indifferent to other people's opinions of us. If we can succeed in doing this, we will improve the quality of our life.
• Realize that many other people, including, quite possibly, your friends and relatives, want you to fail in your undertakings. They may not tell you this to your face, but this doesn’t mean that they aren’t silently rooting against you. People do this in part because your success makes them look bad and therefore makes them uncomfortable: If you can access, why can’t they
• Rather than living to eat we should eat to live.
• Favor simple things.
• People who achieve luxurious lifestyles are rarely satisfied.
• There is a danger that wealth will corrupt us, particularly if we use it to finance luxurious living. The danger that fame will corrupt us, however, is even greater.
• Exile is nothing but a change of place.
• A primary objective of Stoicism is to teach us not only to meet life’s challenges but to retain our tranquility as we do.
• Anyone wishing to become a Stoic should do so unobtrusively.
• Having a philosophy of life, whether it be Stoicism or some other philosophy, can dramatically simplify everyday living. If you have a philosophy of life, decision making is relatively straightforward: when choosing between the options life offers, you simply choose the one most likely to help you attain the goals set forth by your philosophy of live.
• If we prevent or overcome an emotion, there will be nothing to bottle.
• It is true that trying to reason our way out of grieving is one way to work through grief, but a better way is to try to elicit from ourselves various grief-related behaviors.
• I think people are less brittle and more resilient, emotionally speaking, than therapists give them credit for.
• 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.
• Stoicism teach us that we are very much responsible for our happiness as well as our unhappiness. It also teaches us that it is when we assume responsibility for our happiness that we will have a reasonable chance of gaining it.
• We need to take steps to slow down the desire-formation process within us. Rather than working to fulfill whatever desires we find in our head, we need to work at preventing certain desires from forming and eliminate many of the desires that have formed. And rather than waiting new things, we need to work at wanting the things we already have.
• Philosophies of life have two components: They tell us what things in life are and aren’t worth pursuing, and they tell us how to gain the things that are worth having.
• Although are evolutionary programming helped us flourish as a species, it has in many respects outlived its usefulness.
• You should realize that for the vast majority of people, life with a less than perfect mate is better than life with no mate at all.
• The first tip I would offer to those wishing to give Stoicism a try is to practice what I have referred to as stealth Stoicism: You would do well, I Think, to keep it a secret that you are a practicing Stoic.
• At spare moments in the day, make it a point to contemplate the loss of whatever you value in life. Engaging in such contemplation can produce a dramatic transformation in your outlook on life.
• After mastering negative visualization, a novice stoic should move on to become proficient in applying the trichotomy of control.
• We waste our time and cause ourselves needless anxiety if we concern ourselves with things over which we have no control.
• As a Stoic novice, you will want, as part of becoming proficient in applying the trichotomy of control, to practice internalizing your goals. By routinely internalizing your goals, you can reduce what would otherwise be a significant source of distress in your life: the feeling that you have failed to accomplish some goal.
• The past and present cannot be changed, it is pointless to which they could be different. You will do your best to accept the past, whatever it might have been, and to embrace the present, whatever it might be.
• One of the worst things we can do when other people annoy us is to get angry. The anger will, after all, be a moor obstacle to our tranquility. The Stoics realized that anger is anti-joy and that it can ruin our life if we let it.
• Whenever you undertake an activity in which public failure is a possibility, you are likely to experience butterflies in your stomach.
• The Stoics recommend simplifying one’s lifestyle.
• The goal of stoicism is the attainment of tranquility.
• Readers are encouraged to take a look at Stoic primary sources.
• We should become self-aware: We should observe ourselves as we go about our daily business, and we should periodically reflect on how we responded to the day’s events.
• We should user our reasoning ability to overcome negative emotions. We should also use our reasoning ability to master our desires, to the extent that it is possible to do so.
• If, despite not having pursued wealth, we find ourselves wealthy, we should enjoy our affluence. But although, we should enjoy wealth, we should not cling to it/ indeed, even as we enjoy it, we should contemplate its loss.
• We should form and maintain relationships with others.
• The Stoics pointed to two principle sources of human unhappiness--our insatiability and our tendency to worry about things beyond our control.
• To conquer our insatiability, the Stoics advise us to engage in negative visualization. We should contemplate the impermanence of all things. We should imagine yourself losing the things we most value, including possessions and loved ones. We should also imagine the loss of our own life.
• We should spend some of our time dealing with things over which we have complete control, and spend most of our time dealing with things over which we have some but not complete control. 
• When we spend time dealing with things over which we have some but not complete control we should be careful to internalize our goals.
• We should be fatalistic with respect to the external world: We should realize that what has happened to us in the past and what is happening to us at this very moment are beyond our control, so it is foolish to get upset about these things.