If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it.
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Not all distress comes from events alone. Some part of it is shaped by the meaning quickly assigned to those events.
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Marcus is not dismissing pain. He is identifying a second lever: judgment. When judgment is examined, suffering can sometimes be reduced without denying what happened.
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The line remains valuable because it returns practical agency in moments that feel externally fixed.
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