The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living

by Ryan Holiday

whatever your perceived deficits are, remember that there are positive qualities that you can develop that don’t depend on genetic accidents.

You have the choice to be truthful. You have the choice to be dignified. You can choose to endure. You can choose to be happy. You can choose to be chaste. You can choose to be thrifty. You can choose to be kind to others. You can choose to be free. You can persist under difficult odds. You can avoid trafficking in gossip. You can choose to be gracious.

“Dig deep within yourself, for there is a fountain of goodness ever ready to flow if you will keep digging.” —MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 7.59

You have two essential tasks in life: to be a good person and to pursue the occupation that you love. Everything else is a waste of energy and a squandering of your potential.

Philosophy attracts introverts. The study of human nature can make you aware of other people’s faults and can breed contempt for others.

we are, as Aristotle put it, social animals. We need each other. We must be there for each other. We must take care of each other (and to allow others to care for us in return). To pretend otherwise is to violate our nature, to be more or less than what it means to be a human being.

character is a far better measure of a man or woman. Not just for jobs, but for friendships, relationships, for everything.

The average person somehow manages to squeeze in twenty-eight hours of television per week—but ask them if they had time to study philosophy, and they will probably tell you they’re too busy.

You were born with an attraction to virtue and self-mastery. If you’ve gotten far from that, it’s not out of some inborn corruption but from a nurturing of the wrong things and the wrong ideas.

Something happened that we wish had not. Which of these is easiest to change: our opinion or the event that is past? The answer is obvious. Accept what happened and change your wish that it had not happened. Stoicism calls this the “art of acquiescence”—to accept rather than fight every little thing.

No matter how much preparation, no matter how skilled or smart we are, the ultimate outcome is in the lap of the gods. The sooner we know that, the better we will be.

The Stoics were masters at analogies and used them as a tool to help strengthen their reasoning.

You don’t have to believe there is a god directing the universe, you just need to stop believing that you’re that director. As soon as you can attune your spirit to that idea, the easier and happier your life will be, because you will have given up the most potent addiction of all: control.

You’re just like the people who came before you, and you’re but a brief stopover until the people just like you who will come after. The earth abides forever, but we will come and go.

“When you are distressed by an external thing, it’s not the thing itself that troubles you, but only your judgment of it. And you can wipe this out at a moment’s notice.”

Let’s not confuse acceptance with passivity.

As the president of our own lives—and knowing that our powers begin and end with our reasoned choice—we would do well to internalize this same attitude.

we go into each and every day knowing that there is no one to pass the buck to. It ends with us.

It’s so easy to complain about this or that, or to try to make excuses and justifications for the things you’ve done. But that doesn’t accomplish anything—and it never lightens the load.

Acceptance isn’t passive. It’s the first step in an active process toward self-improvement.

“No man steps in the same river twice.” Because the river has changed, and so has the man.

Everything is change. Embrace that. Flow with it.

Our faults are in our control, and so we turn to philosophy to help scrape them off like barnacles from the hull of a ship. Other people’s faults? Not so much. That’s for them to do.

“The glass is already broken.”

our attachments are what make it so hard to accept change.

Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland—running faster and faster to stay in the same place.

We’re all here and we’re all going to leave this earth eventually, so let’s not concern ourselves with petty differences in the meantime. We have too much to do.

“How satisfying it is to dismiss and block out any upsetting or foreign impression, and immediately to have peace in all things.”

“I know the reaction I typically take in these situations, and I’m not going to do it this time.” And then follow it with: “I’m also going to remove this stimulus from my life in the future as well.” Because what follows is peace and serenity.

The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.”

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.

Booker T. Washington observed that “the number of people who stand ready to consume one’s time, to no purpose, is almost countless.”

“I say, let no one rob me of a single day who isn’t going to make a full return on the loss.”

Seneca put it best when he said, “Life is long if you know how to use it.”

Use today. Use every day. Make yourself satisfied with what you have been given.

There is another helpful consideration about death from the Stoics. If death is truly the end, then what is there exactly to fear?

As frightening as death might seem, remember: it contains within it the end of fear.

“It’s not at all that we have too short a time to live, but that we squander a great deal of it. Life is long enough, and it’s given in sufficient measure to do many great things if we spend it well.