Fortitude
idea · 2 works · 3 mentions · 3 anchored passages
fortitude · bravery · patience · perseverance · virtue
in the texts
Tusculan Disputations
The virtue of courage and endurance, defined as contempt of death and pain, central to the argument that pain must be resisted.
Either fortitude, then, must be given up, or pain must be buried.
and a man's most proper attribute is fortitude, whose two greatest functions are the contempt of death and of pain.
For so long as it shall seem to you base and unworthy of a man to groan, to wail, to lament, to be broken, to be unmanned by pain — so long as honour, as dignity, as decorum is present, and you, looking to these, restrain yourself — pain will surely yield to virtue and grow faint at the soul's resolve.
On Moral Ends
The virtue of courage and endurance, argued by Torquatus to be valued only because it secures a life free of anxiety.
For neither the discharge of toils nor the endurance of pains allures of itself, nor patience, nor perseverance, nor wakeful vigils, nor even that very industry which is praised, nor fortitude itself;