Keep death and exile before your eyes each day, along with everything that seems terrible—by doing so, you’ll never have a base thought nor will you have excessive desire.
—Epictetus, Enchiridion, 21
Political winds could change in an instant, depriving you of the most basic freedoms you take for granted. Or, no matter who you are or how safely you’ve lived your life, there’s someone out there who would rob and kill you for a couple dollars.
As it’s written in the timeless Epic of Gilgamesh:
“Man is snapped off like a reed in the canebrake!
The comely young man, the pretty young woman—
All too soon in their prime Death abducts them!”
Death is not the only unexpected interruption we might face—our plans can be dashed to pieces by a million things. Today might be a bit more pleasant if you ignore those possibilities, but at what cost?
* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
Anything that can be prevented, taken away, or coerced is not a person’s own—but those things that can’t be blocked are their own.
—Epictetus, Discourses, 3.24.3
The conservationist Daniel O’Brien has said that he doesn’t “own” his several-thousand-acre buffalo ranch in South Dakota, he just lives there while the bank lets him make mortgage payments on it. It’s a joke about the economic realities of ranching, but it also hints at the idea that land doesn’t belong to one individual, that it will far outlast us and our descendants. Marcus Aurelius used to say that we don’t own anything and that even our lives are held in trust.
We may claw and fight and work to own things, but those things can be taken away in a second. The same goes for other things we like to think are “ours” but are equally precarious: our status, our physical health or strength, our relationships. How can these really be ours if something other than us—fate, bad luck, death, and so on—can dispossess us of them without notice?
So what do we own? Just our lives—and not for long.
* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
Philosophy does not claim to get a person any external possession. To do so would be beyond its field. As wood is to the carpenter, bronze to the sculptor, so our own lives are the proper material in the art of living.
—Epictetus, Discourses, 1.15.2
Philosophy is not some idle pursuit appropriate only for academics or the rich. Instead, it is one of the most essential activities that a human being can engage in. Its purpose, as Henry David Thoreau said a few thousand years after Epictetus, is to help us “solve the problems of life, not only theoretically put practically.” This aligns nicely with Cicero‘s famous line: “To philosophize is to learn how to die.”
You’re not reading these quotes and doing these thought exercises for fun. Though they may be enjoyable and help you lighten up, their aim is to help you sculpt and improve your life. And because all of us have but one life and one death, we should treat each experience like a sculptor with his chisels, carving until, to paraphrase Michelangelo, we set free the angel in the marble.
We are trying to do this difficult thing—living and dying—as well as we can. And to do that, we must remember what we’ve learned and the wise words we’ve been given.
* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
Let each thing you would do, say or intend be like that of a dying person.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.11.1
Have you ever heard some ask: “What would you do if you found out tomorrow that you had cancer?” The question is designed to make you consider how different life might be if you were suddenly given just a few months or weeks to live. There’s nothing like a terminal illness to wake people up.
But here’s the thing: you already have a terminal diagnosis. We all do! As the writer Edmund Wilson put it, “Death is one prophecy that never fails.” Every person is born with a death sentence. Each second that passes by is one you’ll never get back.
Once you realize this, it will have a profound impact on what you do, say, and think. Don’t let another day tick away in ignorance of the reality that you’re a dying person. We all are. Can today be the day we stop pretending otherwise?
* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day…. The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.
—Seneca, Moral Letters, 101.7b-8a
“Live each day as if it were your last” is a cliche. Plenty say it, few actually do it. How reasonable would that be anyway? Surely Seneca isn’t saying to forsake laws and considerations—to find some orgy to join because the world is ending.
A better analogy would be a soldier about to leave on deployment. Not knowing whether they’ll return or not, what do they do?
They get their affairs in order. They handle their business. They tell their children or their family that they love them. They don’t have time for quarreling or petty matters. And then in the morning they are ready to go—hoping to come back in one piece but prepared for the possibility that they might not.
Let us live today that same way.
* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
The person who follows reason in all things will have both leisure and a readiness to act—they are at once both cheerful and self-composed.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 10.12b
The guiding reason of the world—the Stoics called this the logos—works in mysterious ways. Sometimes, the logos gives us what we want, other times it gives us precisely what we do not want. In either case, they believed that the logos was an all-powerful force that governed the universe.
There is a helpful analogy to explain the logos: We are like a dog leashed to a moving cart. The direction of the cart will determine where we go. Depending on the length of the leash, we also have a fair amount of room to explore and determine the pace, but ultimately what each of us must choose is whether we will go willingly or be painfully dragged. Which will it be?
Cheerful acceptance? Or ignorant refusal? In the end, they amount to the same.
* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
Don’t lament this and don’t get agitated.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.43
There’s that feeling we get when something happens: It’s all over now. All is lost. What follows are complaints and pity and misery—the impotent struggle against something that’s already occurred.
Why bother? We have no idea what the future holds. We have no idea what’s coming up around the bend. It could be more problems, or this could be the darkness before the dawn.
If we’re Stoic, there is one thing we can be sure of: whatever happens, we’re going to be OK.
* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
If someone is slipping up, kindly correct them and point out what they missed. But if you can’t, blame yourself—or no one.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 10.4
A good teacher knows that when a student is failing, the blame falls on the instructor, not the pupil. How much more generous and tolerant would we be if we could extend this understanding to other spheres in our life? To be able to see that if a friend is unreliable, maybe it’s because they don’t know what’s wrong or because we haven’t tried to help them fix their flaw. If an employee is underperforming, just talk to them or figure out if they’re lacking in support. If someone is being annoying, try talking to them about the problem with their behavior, or ask yourself: Why am I being so sensitive?
And if this doesn’t work, try letting it go. It might be an isolated incident anyway.
* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
