Source identified
“If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.”
Composure under social pressure is treated as a mark of maturity, especially when panic and blame are spreading around you.
Source note: Poem “If—,” opening lines.
Source identified
“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.”
Composure under collective panic is treated as a form of practical courage and judgment.
Source note: If—, opening line; the next line describes being blamed by those around you.
Source identified
“No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it.”
An obsession with extending life can undermine the peace of the life already present, because fear of ending displaces attention from living.
Source note: Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 4.
Source identified
“Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.”
Epictetus separates an event from the judgment placed on it, making interpretation a practical point of leverage.
Source note: Enchiridion 5 in George Long’s translation; the passage distinguishes events from the opinions that disturb us.
Source identified
“Take away thy opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint, “I have been harmed.””
The statement asks whether part of suffering is sustained by the story attached to an event rather than by the event alone.
Source note: Meditations, Book IV, in George Long’s translation.
Source identified
“For I now call a freedom from anxiety a security, on which freedom a happy life depends.”
Voice: Dialogue speaker · M. (Cicero’s dialogue persona)
Cicero treats inner security as freedom from destabilizing anxiety, making mental steadiness an important condition of a genuinely happy and self-directed life.
Source note: Tusculan Disputations, Book V; Cicero discusses security as freedom from anxiety within a larger argument about virtue, stability, and the conditions of happiness.