363 definitions
The book's index
Tusculan Disputations
218 concepts · 363 definitions
- acute pain1
- advice1
- affliction1
- Alcibiades1
- alphabet1
- ambition2
- anger8
- appetite1
- arms1
- art1
- astronomer1
- atomism1
- avarice1
- aversion1
- belief1
- bereavement1
- birth1
- blindness2
- boasting1
- body2
- bravery1
- burden1
- burial2
- candidate1
- celebrity1
- character1
- citizen of the world1
- comedy1
- composure1
- confusion1
- conscience1
- consolation4
- constancy1
- contentment1
- corpse2
- countenance1
- courage3
- covetousness1
- cowardice1
- critic1
- crowd1
- custom3
- dead2
- deafness2
- death11
- debate2
- defeat1
- desire3
- despair1
- detraction1
- dialectic1
- disgrace1
- dread1
- dying1
Grief (n.) is the rack itself: lust brings heat, joy levity, fear meanness, but grief consumes, tears, and utterly destroys a man.
Grief (n.) is never only for our own loss: its bitter tears come from imagining that the one we loved is deprived of life's good things and feels it.
Grief (n.) waits for leisure: Pompey's friends, fleeing the enemy as he lay dying, began to lament him only when they reached Tyre.
Grief (n.) is doubly unjust: born mortal, we demand the condition of the immortals, and we take it to heart that we must restore what was only lent.
Death (n.) or life — which is better, the immortal Gods know; but no mortal man does.
Death (n.) is so far from being an evil that it may be the only real good a man has.
Death (n.) has no connection with either the living or the dead: the dead do not exist, and the living are not yet touched by it.
Death (n.) withdraws us from evil, not from good.
Pain (n.) exists more in opinion than in nature: Marius was the first man ever operated on without being tied down, and others then bore it by force of example — though Marius would not offer the other thigh.
Pain (n.) is proved an evil, said Dionysius of Heraclea, by the fact that after so many years of philosophy he still could not bear it.
Pain (n.) is to no purpose: however troublesome it is, I will never acknowledge it an evil.
Pain (n.) need not be enjoyed — bearing it with courage is sufficient; for pain is beyond all question sharp, bitter, against nature, hard to bear.
Anger (n.) cannot be natural, since men repent of it: Alexander could scarcely keep his hands from himself after he had killed Clitus.
Anger (n.) is a swelling of the mind, and a swollen mind is no more in order than a swollen hand.
Anger (n.) is the worst moment to punish: \"How I would have treated you,\" Archytas told his steward, \"if I had not been in a passion!\"
Philosophy (n.) is the guide of life: one day spent well by her precepts is preferable to an eternity of error.
Philosophy (n.) founded the city: she called the scattered race of men together into social life, first as neighbors, then by marriages, and lastly by speech.
Philosophy (n.) is the medicine of our souls: it banishes groundless apprehensions, frees us from desires, and drives away fears.
Philosophy (n.) is a medicine of the soul that cannot be fetched from abroad, as a doctor is for the body: we must work our own cure.
Soul (n.) is harder to understand inside the body — a place that does not really belong to it — than set free in the æther, its own habitation.
Soul (n.) is a certain straining of the body, like what is called harmony in music — so at death it is simply put out of tune.
Soul (n.) is eternal because it moves itself: never forsaken by itself, it can never cease to be moved.
Soul (n.) has something naturally soft, low and languid in every man; were there nothing besides, men would be the greatest of monsters.
Virtue (n.) is not like Corinthian furniture: lose one piece of that and the rest is safe, but lack one virtue and you are stripped of all.
Virtue (n.) seems the more commendable the less the people are courted, and the fewer eyes there are to see it.
Virtue (n.) takes its very name from vir, a man, and its two principal duties are to despise death and pain.
Virtue (n.) can act for eternity even in a man who believes his soul is mortal; glory inevitably attends it, though glory is not its object.
Happiness (n.) cannot be read from fortune: asked whether the lucky Archelaus was happy, Socrates said, \"I do not know, for I never conversed with him.\"
Happiness (n.) does not come in degrees: if anything is wanting to make a man happier, he is not happy at all.
Happiness (n.) means an absolute enjoyment of good without any alloy of evil.
Happiness (n.) will go with the virtues even to the torture, for neither can the virtues hold together without happiness, nor happiness without them.
Fear (n.) is the stone of Tantalus, hanging over the head of everyone whose mind revolts from reason.
Fear (n.) is grief that has not yet arrived: whatever we grieve at when present, we dread when it hangs over us and approaches.
Fear (n.) makes a quiet and tranquil mind impossible when it dreads what cannot be avoided.
Fear (n.) is caution destitute of reason.
Wisdom (n.) is often concealed in mean attire.
Wisdom (n.) is never being surprised: thinking, before the event, that there is nothing which may not come to pass.
Wisdom (n.) is an acquaintance with all divine and human affairs, and a knowledge of the cause of everything.
Wisdom (n.) is the soundness of the mind; folly is its unsoundness, which is insanity.