Indifferents & Preferred Indifferents

Whatever is is either evil or good or indifferent. We call that evil which is capable of invariably doing harm; for instance, bad judgement and folly and injustice and the like. The contraries of thes

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Goods comprise the virtues of prudence, justice, courage, temperance, and the rest; while the opposites of these are evils, namely, folly, injustice, and the rest. Neutral (neither good nor evil, that

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Hence of these latter some are taken by preference, others are rejected, whereas indifference in the other sense affords no ground for either choosing or avoiding. Of things indifferent, as they expre

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What we ought to have ready in difficult circumstances. WHEN you are going in to any great personage, remember that another also from above sees what is going on, and that you ought to please him rath

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That we do not strive to use our opinions about good and evil. WHERE is the good? In the will. Where is the evil? In the will. Where is neither of them? In those things which are independent of the wi

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How magnanimity is consistent with care. THINGS themselves (materials) are indifferent; but the use of them is not indifferent. How then shall a man preserve firmness and tranquillity, and at the same

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Of indifference. THE hypothetical proposition is indifferent: the judgment about it is not indifferent, but it is either knowledge or opinion or error. Thus life is indifferent: the use is not indiffe

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To those who are desirous of passing life in tranquillity. REMEMBER that not only the desire of power and of riches makes us mean and subject to others, but even the desire of tranquillity, and of lei

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Let not these thoughts afflict you, I shall live unhonored and be nobody nowhere. For if want of honor ([Greek: atimia]) is an evil, you cannot be in evil through the means (fault) of another any more

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To live happily is an inward power of the soul, when she is affected with indifferency, towards those things that are by their nature indifferent. To be thus affected she must consider all worldly obj

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In every one of his natural and ethical books, he asserts vice to be the very essence of unhappiness; writing and contending that to live viciously is the same thing as to live unhappily. But in his T

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DIADUMENUS. This also is against common sense, that it should be convenient for a man who has all good things, and wants nothing requisite to felicity and happiness, to make away himself; and much mor

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Similarly there is nothing naturally indifferent, because of the divergence of opinion about things indifferent. The Stoics, for example, assert that of the indifferents some are preferred, some rejec

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Again, of things preferred some are preferred for their own sake, some for the sake of something else, and others again both for their own sake and for the sake of something else. To the first of thes

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Ariston the Bald, of Chios, who was also called the Siren, declared the end of action to be a life of perfect indifference to everything which is neither virtue nor vice; recognizing no distinction wh

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Of the things which are in our power, and not in our power. OF all the faculties (except that which I shall soon mention), you will find not one which is capable of contemplating itself, and, conseque

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On friendship. WHAT a man applies himself to earnestly, that he naturally loves. Do men then apply themselves earnestly to the things which are bad? By no means. Well, do they apply themselves to thin

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What things we ought to despise, and what things we ought to value. THE difficulties of all men are about external things, their helplessness is about externals. What shall I do, how will it be, how w

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Remember that desire contains in it the profession (hope) of obtaining that which you desire; and the profession (hope) in aversion (turning from a thing) is that you will not fall into that which you

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HOW FROM THE FACT THAT WE ARE AKIN TO GOD A MAN MAY PROCEED TO THE CONSEQUENCES.—I indeed think that the old man ought to be sitting here, not to contrive how you may have no mean thoughts nor mean an

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