The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual

by Ward Farnsworth

If any external thing causes you distress, it is not the thing itself that troubles you, but your own judgment about it. And this you have the power to eliminate now. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.47

We believe these affairs of ours are great because we are small.

What else but to venerate and praise the gods, to do good to others, and to treat them with tolerance and restraint; and as for what is within the bounds of your body and your breath, to remember that it is neither yours nor up to you. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.33

You ask what the finest life span would be? To live until you reach wisdom.

No one can have whatever he wants. What he can do is not want what he doesn’t have, and cheerfully enjoy what comes his way.

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

Stoics are supposed to be of good cheer. Some of them need to lighten up.

The Stoic develops a distrust for popular judgments, and a suspicion of people and things that have mass appeal.

Someone will disdain me? That is his concern. My concern is that I not be found doing or saying anything worthy of disdain. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11.13

Every man overrates the offense of his companions, but extenuates his own. Montaigne, Of Drunkenness (1580)

Whenever you take offense at someone else’s fault, turn immediately to find the fault most similar in yourself – such as attachment to money, or pleasure, or reputation, or whatever it might be. In seeing this, you will quickly forget your anger; it will occur to you that he was forced to act that way. For what else could he do? Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 10.30

If need be, reason silently, quietly wipes out whole families root and branch, and households that are a plague on the state it destroys along with wives and children; it tears down their very houses, levelling them to the ground, and exterminates the names of the enemies of liberty. All this it will do, but with no gnashing of the teeth, no violent shaking of the head, nothing that would be unseemly for a judge, whose countenance should at no time be more calm and unmoved than when delivering a weighty sentence. Seneca, On Anger 1.19.2

Nothing happens to anyone that he is not formed by nature to bear. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.18

Fire tests gold, misfortune brave men.

You have passed through life without an antagonist; no one will know what you can do, not even you yourself.” Seneca, On Providence 4.2–3

Let nothing be done in your life that will cause you fear if it is discovered by your neighbor. Epicurus, Vatican Sayings 70

Live among others as if God were watching; speak with God as if others were listening.

Epicurus says: “The sage will not engage in public affairs unless he must.” Zeno says: “The sage will engage in public affairs unless he cannot.” Seneca, On Leisure 2.2

where it is possible to live, it is also possible to live well. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.16