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Lacking in self-control, some people find eating and drinking things they shouldn’t, pleasurable!
On the other hand, there are others who exercise self-control and find great pleasure in abstaining from eating and drinking things they shouldn’t.
In other words, self control can be very pleasurable, even more so than consuming questionable food and drink!
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One of the great fears many of us face is that despite all our effort and striving, we will discover at the end that we have wasted our life. In A Guide to the Good Life, William B. Irvine plumbs the wisdom of Stoic philosophy, one of the most popular and successful schools of thought in ancient Rome, and shows how its insight and advice are still remarkably applicable to modern lives.
In A Guide to the Good Life, Irvine offers a refreshing presentation of Stoicism, showing how this ancient philosophy can still direct us toward a better life. Using the psychological insights and the practical techniques of the Stoics, Irvine offers a roadmap for anyone seeking to avoid the feelings of chronic dissatisfaction that plague so many of us. Irvine looks at various Stoic techniques for attaining tranquility and shows how to put these techniques to work in our own life. As he does so, he describes his own experiences practicing Stoicism and offers valuable first-hand advice for anyone wishing to live better by following in the footsteps of these ancient philosophers. Readers learn how to minimize worry, how to let go of the past and focus our efforts on the things we can control, and how to deal with insults, grief, old age, and the distracting temptations of fame and fortune. We learn from Marcus Aurelius the importance of prizing only things of true value, and from Epictetus we learn how to be more content with what we have.
Finally, A Guide to the Good Life shows readers how to become thoughtful observers of their own lives. If we watch ourselves as we go about our daily business and later reflect on what we saw, we can better identify the sources of distress and eventually avoid that pain in our life. By doing this, the Stoics thought, we can hope to attain a truly joyful life.
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Taking the “Fatty” out for a stroll today on my favorite trail – Desert Classic (South Mountain).
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To restrain yourself from food and drink is “abstemious” by definition; this is required if you intend to lose weight, maintain weight, gain self control, improve self esteem and succeed in reaching your personal goals. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, quite frankly, I could careless about having the cake in the first place.
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When philosophy rescued him from an emotional crisis, Jules Evans became fascinated by how ideas invented over two thousand years ago can help us today. He interviewed soldiers, psychologists, gangsters, astronauts, and anarchists and discovered the ways that people are using philosophy now to build better lives. Ancient philosophy has inspired modern communities — Socratic cafés, Stoic armies, Epicurean communes — and even whole nations in the quest for the good life.
This book is an invitation to a dream school with a rowdy faculty that includes twelve of the greatest philosophers from the ancient world, sharing their lessons on happiness, resilience, and much more. Lively and inspiring, this is philosophy for the street, for the workplace, for the battlefield, for love, for life.
https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Life-Other-Dangerous-Situations/dp/1608682293
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Our minds must be interested and absorbed in something, for the majority of us, its our own reflection in the mirror and our personal thoughts. When we are not busy looking and thinking about ourselves, our minds must become interested in something else, that something else, is other people!
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When we learn about something that wasn’t readily known before, or see something from a new and unexpected angle, it literally takes a hold of us and alters how we view the world; that’s an insight! We shouldn’t wait for insights to come to us, we should seek them out by actively learning with a purpose. We should read books with depth, watch television and movies of substance, attend interesting and enlightening courses and engage in activities that mentally expand us and emotionally ground us.
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Meaning and direction in life are naturally provided through self improvement; grow your mind while building or maintaining your body!
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To pursue what is most real, most important and most meaningful in life… is a life well lived.
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Reading a well written book and/or having a meaningful conversation with someone nearly everyday is to the mind as exercising and nutrition is to the body; both keep you sharp and in shape!
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Always keeping things fresh and new at StrengthLab!
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We live in an age of unprecedented anxiety. Spending all our time trying to anticipate and plan for the future and to lamenting the past, we forget to embrace the here and now. We are so concerned with tomorrow that we forget to enjoy today. Drawing from Eastern philosophy and religion, Alan Watts shows that it is only by acknowledging what we do not—and cannot—know that we can learn anything truly worth knowing. In The Wisdom of Insecurity, he shows us how, in order to lead a fulfilling life, we must embrace the present—and live fully in the now.
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French superstar philosopher Luc Ferry encapsulates an enlightening treatise of pop-philosophy in a lively narrative of Western thought—explaining how the history of philosophy can teach us how to live better lives today.
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Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves—and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives—and destroyed them.
Now, Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are. Penguin’s Great Ideas series features twelve groundbreaking works by some of history’s most prodigious thinkers, and each volume is beautifully packaged with a unique type-drive design that highlights the bookmaker’s art. Offering great literature in great packages at great prices, this series is ideal for those readers who want to explore and savor the Great Ideas that have shaped the world.
The Stoic writings of the philosopher Seneca offer powerful insights into the art of living, the importance of reason and morality, and continue to provide profound guidance to many through their eloquence, lucidity and timeless wisdom.
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“John is so calm, so poised, so much at home with himself, so much a familiar spirit of the forests, ” wrote Walt Whitman of his friend, the naturalist and writer John Burroughs. “He is a child of the woods, fields, hills – native to them in a rare sense (in a sense almost a miracle).” Henry James called Burroughs “a more humorous, more available and more sociable Thoreau. James wrote that “the minuteness of Burroughs’s observation, the keenness of his perception, give him a real originality, and his sketches have a delightful oddity, vivacity, and freshness.” Burroughs was born in 1837, the same year that Henry Thoreau graduated from Harvard. Along with Thoreau and John Muir, he was one of the nineteenth century’s most popular and preeminent nature writers. In the course of his long life, Burroughs authored more than twenty-eight books on natural history and literature. Writing during the increasingly industrial decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Burroughs stayed constant to the transcendental message of his idols – Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. During what Mark Twain called the “faithless” era of the Gilded Age, Burroughs urged his readers to go to the woods to develop a relationship with nature that did not “vulgarize it and rob it of its divinity.” In this outstanding new book – the first full biography of John Burroughs to be published since 1925 – Edward J Renehan, Jr. draws on a wealth of previously unpublished manuscripts, journals, and letters to reveal the life of the dean of American nature writers. Renehan describes Burroughs’s relationships with some of the most notable figures of his time, including Jay Gould, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Edison, John Muir, E. H. Harriman, Andrew Carnegie, Oscar Wilde and especially Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Ford, with whom he developed complicated and enduring friendships.
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Personally, I don’t understand why any “so called” educated adult would intentionally put artificial substances in their mouth and believe it to be okay – normal – no big deal! Those things are going directly INSIDE you! What you put into your body is the most significant thing altering your health; it has the power to benefit or damage your biological system immediately or over a period of time. Artificial flavors, colors, preservatives, ingredients and the like are to be minimized… and better yet – avoided! Believing a government panel or any professional organization that deems “artificial chemicals” as safe to consume is beyond the bounds of logic and simply VERY naïve!
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Meditations is a series of personal writings by Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor 161–180 CE, setting forth his ideas on Stoic philosophy. Marcus Aurelius wrote the 12 books of the Meditations in Koine Greek as a source for his own guidance and self-improvement. It is possible that large portions of the work were written at Sirmium, where he spent much time planning military campaigns from 170 to 180. Some of it was written while he was positioned at Aquincum on campaign in Pannonia, because internal notes tell us that the second book was written when he was campaigning against the Quadi on the river Granova (modern-day Hron) and the third book was written at Carnuntum. It is not clear that he ever intended the writings to be published, so the title Meditations is but one of several commonly assigned to the collection. These writings take the form of quotations varying in length from one sentence to long paragraphs.
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