The Little Book of Stoicism: Timeless Wisdom to Gain Resilience, Confidence, and Calmness

by Jonas Salzgeber

it teaches you to mindfully live by a set of desirable values such as courage, patience, self-discipline, serenity, perseverance, forgiveness, kindness, and humility.

eudaimonia is a happy and smoothly flowing life that comes from thriving at bringing our moment-to-moment actions into harmony with our highest self.

Live with Areté: Express your highest self in every moment. If we want to be on good terms with our highest self, we need to close the gap between what we’re capable of and what we’re actually doing. This is really about being your best version in the here and now. It’s about using reason in our actions and living in harmony with deep values. This is obviously easier said than done, what supports this ambitious goal is to separate good from bad and focus on what we control.

Things are in constant change, they flow past—new things come and flow past. Therefore, we should remind ourselves how precious our loved ones are—they may soon flow past, too. Let’s appreciate what we have now because it might be gone tomorrow. Life is impermanent.

Despite its value, people hand over their time freely to passersby, to screens of any kind, and other nonessential activities. “We’re tight-fisted with property and money,” says Seneca, “yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers.”

“If a person gave away your body to some passersby, you’d be furious. Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled—have you no shame in that?” – Epictetus

The goal when you enter a conversation is to understand what the other person wants to tell you. You listen with the intent to understand. That’s called empathic listening. And it’ll massively improve your relationships.