Life will have terrible blows, horrible blows, unfair blows. It doesn't matter. And some people recover and others don't. There I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well — an opportunity to learn something.
You've got to have models in your head. And you've got to array your experience — both vicarious and direct — on this latticework of models.
You must know the big ideas in the big disciplines and use them routinely — all of them, not just a few.
Abraham Lincoln·1863I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.
Theodore Roosevelt·1899It seems to me that the simple acceptance of this fundamental fact of American life, this acknowledgment that the law of work is the fundamental law of our being, will help us to start aright in facing not a few of the problems that confront us from without and from within. As regards internal affairs, it should teach us the prime need of remembering that, after all has been said and done, the chief factor in any man's success or failure must be his own character—that is, the sum of his common sense, his courage, his virile energy and capacity. Nothing can take the place of this individual factor.
Theodore Roosevelt·1899A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world. In the last analysis a healthy state can exist only when the men and women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when the children are so trained that they shall endeavor, not to shirk difficulties, but to overcome them; not to seek ease, but to know how to wrest triumph from toil and risk.
