pain

The pain is inevitable, but the misery is optional.

The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you're in control of your life. If you don't, life controls you.

I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures.

Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure ... they govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.

If you are distessed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.