How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius

by Donald J. Robertson

To learn how to die, according to the Stoics, is to unlearn how to be a slave.

we can no more hold on to life than grasp the waters of a rushing stream.

The true goal of life for Stoics isn’t to acquire as many external advantages as possible but to use whatever befalls us wisely, whether it be sickness or health, wealth or poverty, friends or enemies.

What matters, in other words, isn’t what we feel but how we respond to those feelings.

If you stick with the facts and don’t unnecessarily extrapolate from them, you will put paid to many anxieties in life.

the fundamental goal of life for Stoics, the highest good, is to act consistently in accord with reason and virtue.

The technique of exposing yourself to stressful situations repeatedly in small doses so that you build up a more general resistance to emotional disturbance is known in behavioral psychology as “stress inoculation.” It’s like inoculating yourself against a virus, and it’s similar to what we’ve come to think of as resilience building.

The Stoics believe that we take offense because we assume other people’s actions threaten our interests in some way. However, once you consider that your own anger is a bigger threat to you than the thing you’re angry about, then you inevitably start to weaken its grip.