Idea 3 of 12 45 BCE to 1979
Events do not upset us by themselves; our judgments about them do, so changing the judgment changes the feeling.
Said again in 6 books. 3 credit a source by name.
The advice usually arrives as one line: it is not events that upset you, it is your view of them, so change the view and the feeling changes. The idea is 2,070 years old. The earliest source we can find is Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, written in 45 BCE, where Cicero reports the older Stoic teaching that “the whole cause, then, is in opinion”. It kept coming back, in Epictetus’s Enchiridion in 125, in Montaigne’s Essays in 1580, in Hamlet in 1600, and in Albert Ellis’s Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy in 1962, which credits the Stoic philosophers for it.
Older hints exist: Marcus Aurelius credits the Cynic Monimus (4th c. BCE) with “all is opinion”, but that saying is known only through later reports and is about illusion in general, not distress, and Chrysippus’s On Passions (3rd c. BCE) is lost, known through Cicero and Galen. Tusculan Disputations is the earliest surviving text we can find that states the idea.
Earliest we can find
“The whole cause, then, is in opinion; and this observation applies not to this grief alone, but to every other disorder of the mind”
Full text read.
Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.11 (sections 3.24–25), tr. C. D. Yonge (1853).
Project Gutenberg eBook #14988, gutenberg.org/
Echoes
Epictetus states it outright, “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things,” and credits no one that we can find; Socrates appears only as an example.
“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.”
Full text read.
Epictetus, Enchiridion, tr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1865).
Project Gutenberg eBook #45109, gutenberg.org/
Echoes
Marcus writes “Take away thy opinion” and the complaint of being harmed goes with it, and so does the harm. He credits no one, and names the Stoics only on a different point.
“Take away thy opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint, ‘I have been harmed.’”
Full text read.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, tr. George Long (1862).
Project Gutenberg eBook #15877, gutenberg.org/
About 1,410 years with nothing from our reading list. The gap is ours, not history’s.
Cites an ancient Greek sentence
Montaigne says men “are tormented with the opinions they have of things and not by the things themselves” and credits “an ancient Greek sentence”; the editor’s note names the Manual of Epictetus.
“Men (says an ancient Greek sentence)--[Manual of Epictetus, c. 10.]-- are tormented with the opinions they have of things and not by the things themselves.”
Full text read.
Michel de Montaigne, Essays, ‘That the relish for good and evil depends in great measure upon the opinion we have of them’ (1.40), tr. Charles Cotton (ed. W. C. Hazlitt) (1877).
Project Gutenberg eBook #3600, gutenberg.org/
Echoes
Hamlet says “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”: the same place is a prison to him and not to the others. He names no source.
“there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”
Full text read.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet (2.2).
Project Gutenberg eBook #1524, gutenberg.org/
Cites Epictetus, per a summary
Wikipedia has Ellis stating that our thinking about events, not the events, affects us, crediting the Stoic philosophers, quoting the Enchiridion of Epictetus and noting Shakespeare as similar.
“was originally discovered and stated by the ancient Stoic philosophers.”
Secondhand, from Wikipedia. Albert Ellis, Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy (1962).
This book is still in copyright, so we read an account of it, not the book.
Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/
Cites the Stoic philosophers, per a summary
Wikipedia quotes Beck’s manual: “The philosophical origins of cognitive therapy can be traced back to the Stoic philosophers.” The line about judgments rather than events is not quoted from Beck.
“The philosophical origins of cognitive therapy can be traced back to the Stoic philosophers.”
Secondhand, from Wikipedia. Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy of Depression (1979).
This book is still in copyright, so we read an account of it, not the book.
Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/
Next idea
04 What you think, you becomeHow this page was made. AI agents did the reading. Each link was judged by two readers from different AI models, working blind; a third settled their splits (6 of 6 links on this page needed no tiebreak). Every quote was checked word for word against its source. “Full text read” means the agents read the book itself; “Author’s own words” means the author’s free writing elsewhere; “Secondhand” means a free summary or article about the book.
One idea a week, followed across time.
No. 1Small steps add up