Stoic Paradoxes

The Stoics argue that God or Nature has endowed men with intellect, the most excellent and divine thing that exists. The goal of pleasure is worthy only of cattle, not human beings. The appetite for pleasure can never be satisfied, and the fact that pleasure can at some times be good and at some times be evil shows that pleasure cannot be truly good.

• 1.6 Appetite for pleasure can never be satisfied: "For appetite has a thirst that is never fully and completely sated, and they are not only tortured by the lust of increasing their possessions but also by the fear of losing them."
  
• 1.7 Things that are truly good cannot at any time be evil: " Can a thing that is a good be for anybody an evil? or can anybody amidst an abundance of goods be himself not good? Yet all that list of things we see to be of such a nature that even wicked men possess them and that virtuous men derive harm from them. "
  
• 1.9 Good is an action rightly done. Good is only what is right, honorable, and virtuous: "What then is good? ’ somebody will ask. An action rightly done, and honourably, and virtuously, is truly said to be a good action, and I deem good only what is right and honourable and virtuous."
  
• 1.10 It is necessary to discuss the lives of eminent men to see this; it can't be seen when discussed too cooly. Did the men who founded the Republic have any thought of money or property or banquets?
  
• 1.14 Championing pleasure is the language of cattle, not of human beings. But this to me appears to be the language of cattle, not of human beings. On you has been bestowed by God, or else by Nature, the universal mother as she may be called, the gift of intellect, the most excellent and the divinest thing that exists : will you make yourself so abject and so low an outcast as to deem that there is no difference between you and some four-footed animal? Is there any good thing that does not make its owner better ? for in proportion as each man is a partaker in the good, so is he also deserving of praise, and there is no good thing that is not a source of honourable pride to its possessor. But which of these characteristics belongs to pleasure? does it make one a betterman or more praiseworthy ? or does anybody pride himself upon and boast about and advertise Ins success in getting pleasures ? Yet if pleasure, which is championed by the patronage of the largest number, is not to be counted among things good, and if the greater it is the more it dislodges the mind from its own abode and station, assuredly the good and happy life is none other than the life of honour and of rectitude.
  
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