Tusculan Disputations 4 ¶46 — Cicero (on the Stoics)

Cicero (on the Stoics), Tusculan Disputations 4 ¶46

But any perturbation of the mind of this sort may be, as it were, wiped away by the method of appeasing the mind, if you succeed in showing that there is no good in that which has given rise to joy and lust, nor any evil in that which has occasioned fear or grief. But certainly the most effectual cure is to be achieved by showing that all perturbations are of themselves vicious, and have nothing natural or necessary in them. As we see, grief itself is easily softened when we charge those who grieve with weakness and an effeminate mind, or when we commend the gravity and constancy of those who bear calmly whatever befalls them here as accidents to which all men are liable; and, indeed, this is generally the feeling of those who look on these as real evils, but yet think they should be borne with resignation. One imagines pleasure to be a good, another money; and yet the one may be called off from intemperance, the other from covetousness. The other method and address, which, at the same time that it removes the false opinion, withdraws the disorder, has more subtlety in it, but it seldom succeeds, and is not applicable to vulgar minds, for there are some diseases which that medicine can by no means remove. For, should anyone be uneasy because he is without virtue, without courage, destitute of a sense of duty or honesty, his anxiety proceeds from a real evil, and yet we must apply another method of cure to him, and such a one as all the philosophers, however they may differ about other things, agree in. For they must necessarily agree in this, that commotions of the mind in opposition to right reason are vicious, and that even admitting those things to be evils which occasion fear or grief, and those to be goods which provoke desire or joy, yet that very commotion itself is vicious. For we mean by the expressions magnanimous and brave, one who is resolute, sedate, grave, and superior to everything in this life, but one who either grieves, or fears, or covets, or is transported with passion, cannot come under that denomination, for these things are consistent only with those who look on the things of this world as things with which their minds are unequal to contend.