Epictetus takes the same line: "If a man is unhappy, remember that his unhappiness is his own fault; for God has made all men to be happy." "I am," he elsewhere says, "always content with that which happens; for I think that what God chooses is better than what I choose." And again: "Seek not that things should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.... If you wish for anything which belongs to another, you lose that which is your own." Few, however, if any, can I think go as far as St. Bernard. We cannot but suffer from pain, sickness, and anxiety; from the loss, the unkindness, the faults, even the coldness of those we love. How many a day has been damped and darkened by an angry word! Hegel is said to have calmly finished his _Phaenomenologie des Geistes_ at Jena, on the 14th October 1806, not knowing anything whatever of the battle that was raging round him. Matthew Arnold has suggested that we might take a lesson from the heavenly bodies. "Unaffrighted by the silence round them, Undistracted by the sights they see, These demand not the things without them Yield them love, amusement, sympathy. "Bounded by themselves, and unobservant In what state God's other works may be, In their own tasks all their powers pouring, These attain the mighty life you see." It is true that "A man is his own star; Our acts our angels are For good or ill," and that "rather than follow a multitude to do evil," one should "stand like Pompey's pillar, conspicuous by oneself, and single in integrity." [6] But to many this isolation would be itself most painful, for the heart is "no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them." [7] If we separate ourselves so much from the interests of those around us that we do not sympathize with them in their sufferings, we shut ourselves out from sharing their happiness, and lose far more than we gain. If we avoid sympathy and wrap ourselves round in a cold chain armor of selfishness, we exclude ourselves from many of the greatest and purest joys of life. To render ourselves insensible to pain we must forfeit also the possibility of happiness.