It is in your power to withdraw yourself whenever you desire. Perfect tranquility within consists in the good ordering of the mind.
What makes this Stoic observation peculiar is its claim that withdrawal is always available—not because life improves, but because your mental consent to disturbance is optional. Most people hear "order your mind" as a plea for positive thinking, when Marcus is actually describing something colder and more liberating: the recognition that turmoil requires your participation. When you're stuck in traffic fuming at delays, the jam itself is neutral; your insistence that this *shouldn't be happening* is where the actual suffering lives. The radical part isn't that peace is possible—it's that it costs nothing except the willingness to stop arguing with what is.
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason...”
Marcus Aurelius“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. I...”
Viktor Frankl“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Seneca