The four Stoic virtues, and how to practice them

The four virtues are less a list of rules than four questions you can put to any decision: what is true here, what am I avoiding out of fear, what is fair to the other people involved, and what is enough. The Stoics thought a person who could answer those well, consistently, had everything worth having.

The four at a glance

Older English translations often say “prudence” for wisdom and “fortitude” for courage. They mean the same virtues.

Where the list comes from

The four are older than Stoicism. Plato, in Book 4 of the Republic, describes a good city, and a good soul, as wise, brave, temperate and just. The Stoics, whose school Zeno founded in Athens around 300 BCE, kept the four and gave them a sharper definition: each virtue is a form of knowledge. Courage, for example, is knowing what should be feared and endured and what should not (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)).

By the time Marcus Aurelius wrote his private notebook in the second century, the list was standard. In George Long’s 1862 translation, he names all four as examples of what is “really good,” as opposed to what merely looks good to most people:

Elsewhere he gives a slightly different list. In Meditations 3.6 he dares himself to find anything in human life better than “justice, truth, temperance, fortitude”:

Truth stands where you might expect wisdom. Marcus cared about telling the truth as much as seeing it: in Meditations 9.1, in our own words, he argues that someone who lies on purpose acts unjustly, because he deceives. Meditations 3.6 is also the passage the app’s Four Virtues practice is built around. For the man and his notebook, see Marcus Aurelius.

Wisdom

Wisdom, for the Stoics, is not intelligence. It is the skill of telling what is actually good, what is actually bad, and what is neither, and then judging what this situation asks of you. Epictetus puts the whole of it in three questions:

“Will” is Long’s word for Epictetus’s prohairesis, the power to decide what to make of things and what to do about them. Good and bad live there and nowhere else. Money, reputation and comfort are “independent of the will,” so in themselves they are neither good nor bad. Epictetus’s lute player shows what happens without this knowledge: he plays well, sings well and is finely dressed, yet he walks on stage shaking, because no one ever taught him what a crowd, its shouting or its ridicule actually amount to.

In ordinary life, wisdom is the pause before you accept a story about what something means. A job offer with a bigger salary and a worse boss, a friend’s silence after an argument, a rejection email: wisdom asks what is really at stake before you react to what appears to be at stake. It also steers the other three: courage without it turns reckless, and justice without it hardens into box-ticking.

Courage

Stoic courage includes endurance and steadiness as well as bravery. It is the willingness to do what is right when doing it costs you comfort, approval or safety, and it does not require feeling unafraid. Epictetus sees difficulty as the place where character shows:

His images are God as a wrestling trainer who matches you with a rough young opponent on purpose, and a cowardly scout who reports danger at every shadow. Fear makes reports like that scout. Courage is going back to look again, more clearly, and then acting on what you see.

Most of the courage your week asks for is small and specific: telling a client the project will be late, admitting a mistake before someone finds it, saying no to a request you will resent, starting the conversation you have postponed for a month. None of these needs bravado. They need you to stop letting fear make the decision. If fear is the main thing in your way right now, the guide to fear goes further.

Justice

Justice covers how you deal with other people: honesty, fairness, kindness and doing your part in the groups you belong to. The Stoics extended it to everyone, because they counted every human being as a fellow member of one community. Seneca makes the point against Romans who prided themselves on their ancestry:

Marcus goes further. In Meditations 7.13, put in our own words, he says rational beings are made to work together like the limbs of one body. If you think of yourself as a mere part of the whole rather than a limb of it, he adds, you do not yet love people from the heart, and you still do good only because it is proper.

So justice is not mainly about rules or about getting what you are owed. It shows in who gets credit for shared work, in how you speak about a colleague who is not in the room, in how you respond to the new hire, the delivery driver, the relative you find tiresome. It is also why the Stoics were not passive. Accepting what you cannot control never meant leaving other people to their troubles. The other half of the dichotomy of control, a modern name for the lesson that opens Epictetus’s Enchiridion, is putting your full effort into what is up to you.

Temperance

Temperance is a sense of proportion in pleasure, appetite and speech. Marcus pairs it with justice in one short line:

He does not say temperance is opposed to pleasure. He says it is opposed to the love of pleasure, to being run by it. A good meal is not the problem; needing the next one to be grander is. Epictetus gives an image anyone who has shopped online will recognize:

The foot sets the size of the shoe. Once a thing has “passed the true measure” (Enchiridion 39), the foot no longer sets the limit, and nothing else takes its place: gilt, then purple, then embroidery. Temperance is noticing the moment you cross that line, with the third hour of scrolling, the purchase that is about the feeling of buying, the reply that says everything you think instead of what is useful. It applies to speech as much as to appetite. Proportion, not puritanism.

How the four fit together

The Stoics held a doctrine that sounds strange at first: whoever has one virtue has them all (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). The reason is that each virtue is a form of knowledge, and all four draw on the same knowledge of what is good, what is bad and what is neither. They are distinct, the way one person can be a writer, a parent and a colleague, but they stand or fall together. You cannot be just while being easily frightened out of fairness, or wise while being ruled by appetite.

Marcus, for his part, gave justice a special place:

His reasoning shows how the four depend on each other. Justice fails if you set your heart on “middle things,” which are neither good nor bad (a failure of temperance and wisdom), if you are “easily deceived” (a failure of wisdom), or if you are “careless and changeable” (a failure of courage and steadiness). That is the logic behind the virtue check below: several questions about the same decision.

Why virtue is the only good

The boldest Stoic claim is that these four are the only true good. Health, money, reputation and comfort are “indifferents”: having them does not make you good, and losing them does not make you bad. The Stoics did not pretend those things were worthless, either. Health beats sickness and enough money beats want; they called such things “preferred indifferents.” Seneca, a very wealthy man, answered critics who said he did not live by his own teaching (the charge is set out in On the Happy Life 17):

The test is the last line: “my riches belong to me, you belong to your riches” (On the Happy Life 22). You may want the promotion, prefer good health, enjoy being liked. What the Stoics deny is that any of these is worth trading your character for. The principles page sets out this idea alongside the others the app is built on. Notice that nothing here asks you to stop feeling anything; the cold, feelings-are-weakness version of Stoicism online is a different thing, covered in toxic Stoicism.

Try it now: the virtue check

Pick one real decision you are facing this week: a reply you have not sent, a request you are unsure about, a conflict at home. This is the app’s free Four Virtues practice. It asks what the situation is, what wisdom would see, what justice would require, where courage is needed and where restraint (temperance) is, and then for one concrete next action. Every field is optional, and nothing you type leaves your browser.

You will often find that the four answers point the same way. When they do not, that disagreement is the useful part: it usually shows which fear or which appetite was quietly making the decision.

Practicing the virtues in a day

The virtues are practiced in the day you actually have, not in a hypothetical crisis. A simple rhythm:

• Morning: pin a virtue to an appointment. A general resolve to be good rarely survives the morning; a virtue tied to one specific item on your calendar has a better chance. The meeting where credit will be handed out: justice. Dinner with the relative who knows how to provoke you: temperance in speech. The email you have been avoiding: courage.
• In the moment: ask one question. What would wisdom, courage, justice or temperance have me do next? The free Anger exercise in I Need Perspective asks this as one of its steps; anger is when the question is easiest to forget.
• Evening: notice, don’t score. Ask which virtues you practiced today. Choose any that apply, or none. The point is to see your day clearly, not to grade it; a score turns character into a performance and invites either smugness or self-punishment. Seneca describes a nightly review of his own conduct in On Anger 3.36, and the Evening Examination puts that review into five short questions.

If you keep a notebook, the Stoic journaling prompts give you more questions to write from.