u/Splendid_Fellow

Due to the string of recent patterns of posts here I just want to make a suggestion.

- No A.I. written posts. To write with an AI prompt is to expect everyone else to waste their time reading what you couldn’t even be bothered to spend your time writing in the first place. If you also don’t note that it was made by AI, you are demonstrating a lack of integrity.

- No advertising your apps. The goal of stoicism is not more tracking apps. Dependence upon tracking apps (and the money/ads ads within them) is the opposite direction of stoicism. Public forums to talk about it, such as this, are great. When posts are just AI-written vague “wanna understand stoicism? It’s not just this— it’s that. I made an app… here’s the link!” The sub degrades and all posts drift into “this is probably a grift.”

- No preaching. Religious beliefs and adherence to scriptures are not part of stoicism, and coming here to tell everyone that they need your deity in order to find peace is not the purpose of a forum on stoicism. The classical stoics mention “gods” but a better translation would be “the heavens” or Mother Nature, or fate. Something more akin to The Tao or Wu Wei rather than a religious doctrine. There is no dogmatism or commandment in stoicism, and belief on its own is not a virtue.

Just my suggestion to improve this sub.

- “The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontent.”

- “The only difference between me and a madman, is that I’m not mad.”

- “One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened as reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.”

- “Those who do not wish to imitate anything produce nothing.”

- “You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.”

- “Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”

- “A true artist is not one who is inspired, but who inspires others.”

- “I don’t do drugs. I am drugs. Take me, I am the hallucinogenic.”

- “Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!”

- “What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust?”

- “If you understand your painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.”

- “Our age is dying of moral skepticism and spiritual nullity. Imaginative lethargy, in surrendering to the mechanical, fleeting, and material pseudo-progress of the postwar era, has stripped the spirit of its hierarchy. It has disarmed the spirit and dishonored it in the face of death and eternity. Mechanical civilization will be destroyed by war. The machine is destined to collapse and rust, stalled on the battlefields, and the young, energetic masses who built it are condemned to serve as cannon fodder.”

- “It is not I who am the buffoon; it is society—insidious to a degree beyond the grasp of reason or logic, and oblivious even to its own obtuseness, that plays the game of seriousness to mask its madness.”

- “At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”

Got any more greats, anyone?