Do Not Avoid This Thought
In his new book, The Laws of Human Nature, Robert Greene concludes his final chapter with this meditation on mortality:“Many of us spend our lives avoiding the thought of death. Instead the inevitabil...
23 Nov 20183min
What Marcus Learned From Antoninus
Where did Marcus learn to be Marcus? Ernest Renan writes that Marcus was very much a product of his training and his tutors. But more than his teachers and even his own parents, “Marcus had a single m...
22 Nov 20183min
Don’t Get Upset By What You Disagree With
The response to the Daily Stoic emails can be a fascinating peek into human psychology. One email, because it makes a fairly objective point about Donald Trump’s temperament, produces a record number ...
21 Nov 20183min
Write And Think Clearly
In his short new edition of How To Be Free, A.A Long observes the relative ease he had translating Epictetus from ancient Greek into English. This is because, he says, Epictetus’s “conversational mann...
20 Nov 20183min
The Best Way To Fight Evil
Tolstoy believed his most essential work was not his novels but his daily read, A Calendar of Wisdom. Like in The Daily Stoic, each day in that book is a meditation on a theme of ancient wisdom which ...
19 Nov 20182min
The Dance We Each Will Dance
It would be hard to find a deeper, darker yet more philosophically interesting short film than the “Silly Symphony” that Walt Disney produced in 1929. And while many Disney franchises were built aroun...
16 Nov 20184min
The Perils of ‘Comfort Inflation’
It’s so easy to take progress and luxury for granted. Warren Buffet has talked about how somebody today--with the comforts of heating and air conditioning--has what a 15th century king could have only...
15 Nov 20182min
The Most Important Ritual You Can Practice This Year
Why did Marcus Aurelius spend those precious hours in his tent, writing by the lamplight, even on the nights and mornings he strained under the burdens of his war-time duties? It wasn’t for our benefi...
14 Nov 20184min
