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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;thejewk, post: 3917425, member: 100136&quot;]My mistake Rob, I assumed (I assented to a false impression haha) that you were referring to the commonly shared quote which says &#039;Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.&#039;</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;m so used to people posting the image with that quote that I assumed that it was the one you were referring to.&nbsp; Apologies.</p><p><br /></p><p>In the Marcus Aurelius quote you are actually referring to, he is talking specifically about the things that disturb us, and that it is not the thing itself which disturbs us, when we appreciate what it actually is (by using the Stoic theories), but our opinions and false assumptions about what they mean to us.&nbsp; So the Stoic theory states that if we understand what is actually in our power, ie whether we wish to act in accordance with the facts about human nature and world around us, we should then not be disturbed by the thing itself, because we understand whether something is good or bad in advance.&nbsp; If we get an immediate impression during an event, an inevitable thing, we need to recognise that we have formed the beginnings of an opinion, a value judgement, about the thing, and we are not considering the thing itself.</p><p><br /></p><p>An example used in the literature by Seneca, I think, is of a man on a ship during a severe storm.&nbsp; He inevitably shows the beginning signs of fear as a natural impulse, but he is capable with the right preparation of recognising that his initial pangs of fear do not mean that he has to give in in paralysing terror to an imagined chain of events, and that it is better to recognise that according to the Stoic scheme, virtue is the only true good and therefore he must act in accordance with that.</p><p><br /></p><p>Another useful metaphor which gets at the same idea is that we are like a dog tied to a cart that is travelling along the road which is our life.&nbsp; We can either job alongside the cart pleasantly and do what we can with what appears along the way, or be dragged by the neck against out will.&nbsp; We are going along regardless.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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