223 definitions
Ambition (n.) can be refused so completely that only one desire is left: the desire to have no desires.
Desire (n.) arrives without a plan: no one can explain how he came to want what he wants; he was driven there, not reasoned there.
Drift (n.) is the shame of being carried along instead of walking, until in the middle of the whirlwind you stop and ask, 'How did I get here?'
Experience (n.) was, for Seneca, often the best evidence philosophy has — which is why he studied the ordinary person rather than the sage.
Fortune (n.) runs into us no more often than we run into it.
Metaphor (n.) in philosophy is not ornament but a crutch for our weakness, bringing speaker and listener face to face with the thing itself.
The Mind (n.) does not watch its passions from a safe distance; it is itself turned into the passion, which is why the enemy must be stopped at the border.
A Motive (n.) can hide behind a person's own philosophy: Seneca's deepest reasons lie concealed behind a facade built largely of his Stoic convictions.
Orthodoxy (n.) in early Stoicism is less a fact we can see than an artefact of how scholars rebuild lost doctrine; no one speaks of the Platonic theory of forms, yet we speak of the Chrysippean theory of the passions.
Partisanship (n.) is always following one person's opinion; it makes you a member of a faction rather than a senator.