12 Stoic Quotes to Help You Overcome Adversity
How to turn adversity into advantage, balance perspective, and recalibrate your expectations.
Need a perspective shift today? These timeless Stoic quotes will help you calm your mind, gather your courage, and face up to whatever life throws your way.
On turning adversity into advantage:
On the occasion of every accident (event) that befalls you, remember to turn to yourself and inquire what power you have for turning it to use… If it be abusive words, you will find it to be patience. And if you have been thus formed to the (proper) habit, the appearances will not carry you along with them.
- Epictetus, Enchiridion
A setback has often cleared the way for greater prosperity. Many things have fallen only to rise to more exalted heights.
- Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it — turns it to its purposes, incorporates it into itself — so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Let us too overcome all things, with our reward consisting not in any wreath or garland, not in trumpet-calls for silence for the ceremonial proclamation of our name, but in moral worth, in strength of spirit, in a peace that is won forever once in any contest fortune has been utterly defeated.
- Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
On using contrast to balance perspective:
Others have been plundered, indiscriminately, set upon, betrayed, beaten up, attacked with poison or with calumny — mention anything you like, it has happened to plenty of people.
- Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
And here you may mention anything you care to name — a fit of uninterrupted coughing to violent that it brings up part of the internal organs, having one’s very entrails seared by a fever, thirst, having limbs wrenched in different directions with dislocations of the joints… There have been men who have undergone these experiences and never uttered a groan.
- Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
Look around you at all the throng of those you know and those you do not, you will find everywhere men whose sufferings have been greater; legend has not granted exemption from misfortune even to the gods.
- Seneca, Consolation to Helvia
On recalibrating expectations:
‘I did not think this would happen’, and ‘Would you ever have believed that this would happen?’ ‘But why not?’ is my reply.
- Seneca, On the Tranquility of the Mind
Remember: you shouldn’t be surprised that a fig tree produces figs, nor the world what it produces. A good doctor isn’t surprised when his patients have fevers, or a helmsman when the wind blows against him.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out. There are brambles in the path? Then go around them. That’s all you need to know. Nothing more. Don’t demand to know “why such things exist.” Anyone who understands the world will laugh at you, just as a carpenter would if you seemed shocked at finding sawdust in his workshop, or a shoemaker at scraps of leather left over from work.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Evil: the same old thing. No matter what happens, keep this in mind: It’s the same old thing, from one end of the world to the other. It fills the history books, ancient and modern, and the cities, and the houses too. Nothing new at all.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
The foolishness of people who are surprised by anything that happens. Like travelers amazed at foreign customs.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
