The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual

by Ward Farnsworth

You ask what the finest life span would be? To live until you reach wisdom. The one who gets there has arrived, not at the farthest goal, but at the most important. That man, indeed, may boldly congratulate himself, and give thanks to the gods – and to himself along with them – and count in his reckoning with the universe the fact that he has lived. His account will be in credit: he has given it back a better life than he received. Seneca, Epistles 93.8

Not the longest life is the best, but the best-lived. For it is not the one who has played the lyre the most, or made the most speeches, or piloted the most ships, who is commended, but the one who has done these things well. Plutarch, Letter to Apollonius 17 (111a–b)

There is no reason for you to think anyone has lived long just because he has grey hairs or wrinkles. He has not lived long; he has existed long. For suppose you should imagine that a man had a great voyage when in fact he was caught by a fierce storm as soon as he left harbor, was swept this way and that by strong winds from different directions, and was driven along the same path in circles. He did not make a great voyage. He was greatly tossed about. Seneca, On the Shortness of Life 7.10

This is what I mean: your debates and learned talks, your maxims gathered from the teachings of the wise, your cultured conversation – all these afford no proof of the real strength of your soul. Bold speech may issue even from the timid. What you have accomplished will only become evident when you draw your last breath. I accept the terms; I do not shrink from the judgment. Seneca, Epistles 26.6

It is with life as with a play: what matters is not how long it is, but how good. It makes no difference at what point you stop. Leave off where you choose; just be sure to give it a good ending. Seneca, Epistles 77.20

Why are you angry with your slave, with your master, with your patron, with your client? Wait a little. Behold, death comes, which will make you equals. Seneca, On Anger 3.43.1

Toward death, at different paces, moves the entire crowd that now squabbles in the forum, that looks on at the theaters, that prays in the temples; both those you love and revere and those you despise, one heap of ashes will make equal. Seneca, Consolation to Marcia 11.2

We are born unequal; we die equal. I say the same thing about cities as about their inhabitants: Ardea was captured, so was Rome. The founder of human law has not distinguished us based on lineage or illustrious ancestry – except while we are alive. Seneca, Epistles 91.16

The fatted bodies of bulls fall from a tiny wound, and creatures of great strength are felled by a single stroke of the human hand…. No deep retreat conceals the soul; you need no knife at all to root it out, no deeply driven wound to find the vital parts. Death lies near at hand. Seneca, On Providence 6.8–9

You are mistaken if you think that only on an ocean voyage is there a very slight space between life and death. No, the distance between is just as narrow everywhere. It is not everywhere that death shows himself so near at hand; yet everywhere he is as near at hand. Seneca, Epistles 49.11

causes for fear are everywhere; oddly enough, this can relieve us from fear about any one of them, or all of them. Anything might kill you anytime, so you might as well forge on without worrying about it. I say that there is no lasting peace for anything that can perish and cause to perish. But I place this fact in the category of solace, actually a very powerful solace, since fear without remedy is what foolish men have…. If you wish to fear nothing, consider that everything is to be feared. Seneca, Natural Questions 6.2.1

Nothing will give you so much help toward moderation as the frequent thought that life is short and that the little we have is uncertain. Whatever you are doing, be mindful of death. Seneca, Epistles 114.27

Let death and exile and every other thing that appears dreadful be every day before your eyes, but most of all death; and you will never harbor any low thoughts, nor have an extravagant desire for anything. Epictetus, Enchiridion 21

No one can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it, or who believes that living through many consulships is a great blessing. Rehearse this thought every day, so that you may be able to peacefully give up this life to which so many clutch and cling, just as those snatched away by a rushing stream clutch and cling to briars and sharp rocks. Seneca, Epistles 4.4–5

The disturbers of our happiness, in this world, are our desires, our griefs, and our fears, and to all these, the frequent consideration of death is a certain and adequate remedy. Johnson, The Rambler no. 17 (1750)

The perfection of moral character consists in this: to spend each day as if it were the last, to be neither agitated nor numb, and not to pretend. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.69

Think of yourself as having died, and as having finished the life you have lived until now. The portion that is allowed to you beyond this, live out according to nature. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.56

You are going to die at any minute, and yet you still are not simple and straightforward, nor do you have peace of mind, nor are you free from suspicion that you will be hurt by external things, nor are you kind to everyone, nor do you see that being wise consists solely in being just. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.37

We must make it our aim to have already lived long enough. Seneca, Epistles 23.10

Let us order our minds as if we had come to the end. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s account every day. Seneca, Epistles 101.7–8

Take as much as Fortune gives, remembering that it comes with no guarantee. Snatch the pleasures your children bring, let your children in turn find delight in you, and drain joy to the dregs without delay; nothing is promised for this night – nay, I have granted too long an extension! – not even for this hour. We must hurry, the enemy is right behind us! Seneca, Consolation to Marcia 10.4

You will learn the truth by experience: the things that people value highly and try hardest to get do them no good once they have them. Those who don’t have them imagine that, once they do, everything good will be theirs; then they do get them, and the heat of their desires is the same, their agitation is the same, their disgust with what they possess is the same, and their wish for what they don’t have is the same. Epictetus, Discourses 4.1.174

Don’t you know how thirst works in someone with a fever? It is nothing like the thirst of a man in good health. He drinks and is no longer thirsty. The sick man is happy only for a moment, then is nauseous; he converts the drink into bile, he vomits, his stomach hurts, and then he is thirstier still. It is just like this to crave riches and have riches, to crave power and have power, to crave a beautiful woman and sleep with her. Epictetus, Discourses 4.9.4–5

Pile up gold, heap up silver, build covered walks, fill your house with slaves and the town with debtors, unless you lay to rest the passions of the soul, and put a curb on your insatiable desires, and rid yourself of fear and anxiety, you are but pouring out wine for a man in a fever, and giving honey to a man who is bilious, and laying out a sumptuous banquet for people who are suffering from dysentery, and can neither retain their food nor get any benefit from it, but are made even worse by it. Plutarch, On Virtue and Vice 4 (101c)

He who has more than enough and yet hungers for still more will find no remedy in gold or silver or horses and sheep and cattle, but in casting out the source of mischief and being purged. For his ailment is not poverty, but insatiability and avarice, arising from the presence in him of a false and unreflecting judgment; and unless someone removes this, like a tapeworm, from his mind, he will never cease to need superfluities – that is, to want what he does not need. Plutarch, On Love of Wealth 3 (524c–d)

Whatever falls into our possession and knowledge fails to bring satisfaction; we go panting after things unknown and things to come, because the things that are present are never enough. It is not, in my view, that they lack what it takes to satisfy us, but rather that we hold them in an unhealthy and immoderate grip. Montaigne, Of a Saying of Cæsar (1580)

I consider [a Pyramid] as a monument to the insufficiency of human enjoyments. A king, whose power is unlimited, and whose treasures surmount all real and imaginary wants, is compelled to solace, by the erection of a Pyramid, the satiety of dominion and tastelessness of pleasures, and to amuse the tediousness of declining life, by seeing thousands laboring without end, and one stone, for no purpose, laid upon another. Whoever thou art that, not content with a moderate condition, imaginest happiness in royal magnificence, and dreamest that command or riches can feed the appetite of novelty with perpetual gratifications, survey the Pyramids, and confess thy folly. Johnson, Rasselas (1759)

When a piece of good fortune befalls us, our claims mount higher and higher, as there is nothing to regulate them; it is in this feeling of expansion that the delight of it lies. But it lasts no longer than the process itself, and when the expansion is complete, the delight ceases; we have become accustomed to the increase in our claims, and consequently indifferent to the amount of wealth which satisfies them. Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life (1851)

There is no absolute or definite amount of wealth which will satisfy a man. The amount is always relative, that is to say, just so much as will maintain the proportion between what he wants and what he gets; for to measure a man’s happiness only by what he gets, and not also by what he expects to get, is as futile as to try and express a fraction which shall have a numerator but no denominator. A man never feels the loss of things which it never occurs to him to ask for; he is just as happy without them; whilst another, who may have a hundred times as much, feels miserable because he has not got the one thing he wants. Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life (1851)

We eat until we aren’t hungry, and the same thing that was satisfying yesterday can be satisfying today. Other desires, such as the wish for status, are produced by social life, or are created by stimulating the appetite for things we don’t need. Desires of this artificial kind are never quite satisfied; their fulfillment isn’t as pleasing as we imagined, and newer and bigger objects of them must always be sought. And because they aren’t linked to a particular need, they have no natural stopping place.

One man prays: “Help me go to bed with that woman.” You pray: “Help me not to lust after going to bed with her.” Another: “Help me be released from that!” You: “Help me not need to be released.” Another: “How shall I not lose my little son?” You: “How shall I not be afraid to lose him?” Turn your prayers this way, and see what happens. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Wouldn’t anyone admit how much better it is, instead of working hard to get possession of someone else’s wife, to work hard to restrain your desires; instead of being distressed about money, to train yourself to want little; instead of working to become famous, to work not to thirst for fame; instead of finding a way to hurt someone you envy, to find a way not to envy anyone; and instead of acting as a slave to false friends, as sycophants do, to suffer hardships in order to find true friends? Musonius Rufus, That One Should Disdain Hardships

Are there many who surpass you? Consider how many more are behind than ahead of you. Do you ask me what is your greatest fault? Your bookkeeping is wrong. What you have paid out, you value highly; what you have received, low. Seneca, On Anger 3.31.3

When any calamity has been suffered, the first thing to be remembered is how much has been escaped. Johnson, Letter to Hester Thrale (1770)

If we were all to bring our misfortunes into a common store, so that each person should receive an equal share in the distribution, the majority would be glad to take up their own and depart. Plutarch, Letter to Apollonius 9 (106b)

This, however, I know full well – that if all men were to carry their own private troubles to market for barter with their neighbors, there would not be a single one who, when he had looked into the troubles of other men, would not be glad to carry home again what he had brought. Herodotus, Histories 7.152

Don’t imagine having things that you don’t have. Rather, pick the best of the things that you do have and think of how much you would want them if you didn’t have them. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.27

Consider how many more people are poor than rich; and yet you will observe that that the poor are no unhappier and no more anxious than the rich. Seneca, Consolation to Helvia 12.1

I will borrow from Epicurus: “The acquisition of riches has been, for many men, not an end of troubles but a change of them.” I do not wonder. For the fault is not in one’s wealth but in the mind itself. That which had made poverty a burden to us has made riches a burden as well. It matters little whether you lay a sick man on a bed of wood or a bed of gold; wherever he be moved, he will carry his disease with him. So, too, it matters not whether a diseased mind is set down in wealth or in poverty. The malady follows the man. Seneca, Epistles 17.11–12

He who has need of riches feels fear on their account. But no man enjoys a blessing that brings anxiety. He is always trying to add a little more. While he puzzles over increasing his wealth, he forgets how to use it. Seneca, Epistles 14.18

We might define the disease this way: to strive too hard for things that are only worth wanting a little or not at all, or to value things highly that ought to be valued only somewhat or not at all. Seneca, Epistles 75.11

One person seeks joy in feasting and self-indulgence; another, in elections and crowds of supporters; another, in his mistress; another, in the idle display of culture and in literature that has no power to heal. All of them are led astray by delights that are deceptive and short-lived – like drunkenness, for example, which pays for a single hour of hilarious madness with a long-lasting sickness; or like applause and enthusiastic popularity and approval that are gained, and atoned for, at the cost of great mental disquietude. Seneca, Epistles 59.15

What I will teach you is the ability to become rich as speedily as possible. How excited you are to hear the news! And rightly so; I will lead you by a shortcut to the greatest wealth…. My dear Lucilius, not wanting something is just as good as having it. The important thing either way is the same – freedom from worry. Seneca, Epistles 119:1–2

It is not one who has little, but one who craves more, who is poor. What does it matter how much you have laid up in your safe or in your warehouse, how large are your flocks or your investments, if you covet your neighbor’s property, and if you count not what you have but what remains for you to have? Seneca, Epistles 2.6

Every man is rich or poor, according to the proportion between his desires and enjoyments; any enlargement of wishes is therefore equally destructive to happiness with the diminution of possession; and he that teaches another to long for what he never shall obtain, is no less an enemy to his quiet, than if he had robbed him of part of his patrimony. Johnson, The Rambler no. 163 (1751)

Remember that you are an actor in a play of whatever kind the producer may choose. If a short one, short; if a long one, long. If he wants you to play a beggar, see that you act even this part naturally; or a cripple, or a ruler, or an ordinary citizen. Your task is to give a good performance of the part that you are assigned. To select the part belongs to someone else. Epictetus, Enchiridion 17

Count yourself happy only when all your joys are born of reason, and when, having seen the things that everyone clutches at, or prays for, or watches over, you find – I do not say nothing you prefer – but nothing you require. Seneca, Epistles 124.24

No one is worthy of the gods except he who has disdained riches. I do not forbid you to possess them, but I want to bring you to the point at which you possess them without fear. There is only one way to achieve this: by persuading yourself that you can live happily without them, and by regarding them as always about to depart. Seneca, Epistles 18.13

Remember that in life you ought to behave as you would at a banquet. Suppose something is passed around and is across from you. Reach out your hand and take some politely. It passes by: do not hold it back. It has not yet come to you: do not stretch to reach it, but wait till it comes to you. Behave this way toward children, toward a wife, toward wealth, and you will eventually be a worthy fellow banqueter of the gods. But if you do not take the things set before you, and even despise them, then you will be not only a fellow banqueter with the gods, but also a fellow ruler. Epictetus, Enchiridion 15

I do not advise you to deny anything to nature – for nature is insistent, and cannot be overcome; it demands its due. But know that whatever goes beyond those demands is something extra, not a necessity…. I am thirsty: whether I drink water that comes from the nearest pool or water I chilled in the snow, nature does not care. Seneca, Epistles 119.2–3