Stoicism may well be advisable for those with whom fate improvises and who live in violent times and depend on impulsive and changeable people ... is our life really so painful and burdensome that it would be advantageous for us to trade it for a fossilized Stoic way of lite? Things are not bad enough for us that they have to be bad for us in the Stoic style!

- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science