Pain and its endurance
idea · 2 works · 2 mentions · 3 anchored passages
pain · bearing pain bravely · endurance of disease
in the texts
On Moral Ends
The question of whether physical pain constitutes an evil and how it should be endured, illustrated by Dionysius and Arcesilas
Had he been a Peripatetic, he would have remained, I believe, in his opinion — those who say pain is an evil, but, about bearing its harshness bravely, give the same precepts as the Stoics.
Who of us would say — we whom it does not shame to call those things which the Stoics call harsh, evils — that it is better to do something basely with pleasure than honourably with pain?
Letters to Lucilius
The Stoic teaching that physical pain, though real, can and must be mastered through reason and will.
so has Nature, who loves us most, arranged it, that she has made pain either bearable or short.
This, then, is the comfort of vast pain, that you must necessarily cease to feel it, if you feel it too much.
The pain of teeth, of eyes, of ears is for that very reason most acute, because it arises among the narrow parts of the body, and likewise, by Heaven, the pain of the head;