“Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.”
“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will.”
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
“The mind that is anxious about future events is miserable.”
“There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
“What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.”
“The wise person knows it is fruitless to project hopes and fears on the future. This only leads to forming melodramatic representations in your mind and wasting time.”
“People are not disturbed by things, but by the views they take of them.”
“There are more things likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more in our imagination than in reality.”
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”