Memento mori, as the Stoics practiced it

Many people meet the phrase on a ring, a coin or a tattoo, and see it credited to Marcus Aurelius. He never wrote it. What he and the other Stoics did write is more useful than the motto: short, specific instructions for letting the fact of death change what you do on an ordinary day.

What memento mori means for the Stoics

For the Stoics the reminder was a working tool, not a mood. Its job was to make the next decision clearer: what to bother with, what to drop, what not to put off any longer.

Marcus Aurelius puts the whole practice in one line: “regulate every act and thought accordingly” (Meditations 2.11). The thought is supposed to end in action. Epictetus wants it “daily before your eyes” (Enchiridion 21), which settles how often. Neither asks you to feel gloomy. Both care about what you do next.

Two misreadings are worth setting aside. The first is that the practice is morbid. In the same entry, 2.11, Marcus argues that death is “neither good nor evil,” because it comes to good people and bad alike and makes no one worse. The second is that it means living as if there were no tomorrow: spend, indulge, tick off a list. When Marcus draws the conclusion himself, it is two words long: “be good” (Meditations 4.17).

Where the phrase comes from

No Stoic wrote the words memento mori. Marcus Aurelius kept his notebook in Greek, and Epictetus taught in Greek. Seneca wrote in Latin, but the two words do not appear together anywhere in his surviving works.

The story usually told about the phrase is the Roman triumph: as a victorious general rode through Rome, a slave stood behind him in the chariot and whispered that he was mortal. The ancient evidence is a few passing remarks. One comes from Epictetus himself, who mentions, as an aside, the people who stand behind men in their triumphs and remind them that they are mortal (Discourses 3.24). He uses the image to talk about loving people who will die, a passage read in full under negative visualization. The version usually repeated comes from the Christian writer Tertullian, around AD 197, who says that even the emperor, riding in triumph, was told from behind to look back and remember that he was a man (Apology 33). In none of these accounts does anyone say memento mori.

The two-word motto took hold in the Christian centuries that followed. In medieval and early modern Europe, remembering death became a theme of devotion and art: the ashes of Ash Wednesday, skulls carved on tombs, the dance of death, and the vanitas still lifes of 17th-century Dutch painting, with their skulls and hourglasses (Britannica (opens in a new tab)).

That later tradition is also where the skull on the desk comes from. Nothing in Marcus, Epictetus or Seneca mentions keeping a skull, a coin or any other token as a reminder. The Stoic version is done in words: a sentence you say to yourself or write down when you need it. The same caution applies to the death quotes credited to Marcus online; some are his, and some are not.

What the Stoics actually wrote

Five passages carry the practice. They are given here in public-domain translations: George Long’s for Marcus (1862) and Epictetus (1877), and Aubrey Stewart’s for Seneca (1889).

Marcus Aurelius: act accordingly

The first sentence is the practice. The rest of the entry, shortened here, explains why it need not frighten anyone, and the argument turns on one question: “how can it make a man’s life worse?” For Marcus, what spoils a life is acting badly, and death makes no one act badly. The full entry is in Book 2 of the Meditations.

Three sentences: a mistake, a fact and an instruction. The mistake is acting as if the supply of time were endless, which is how most of us make plans. The fact is stated without decoration. The instruction is not “hurry” or “enjoy yourself” but “be good,” with a time limit attached: “while it is in thy power.”

Marcus begins with people whose work kept them close to death, the doctors who frowned over the sick and the astrologers who made confident forecasts of when others would die, and notes that they are dead too. Then he widens the circle to everyone he has known, one burying another, “and all this in a short time.” The last image is an olive that drops when it is ripe, “thanking the tree on which it grew” (Meditations 4.48). The fact is stated flatly. What the entry asks of you is contentment with the span you were given, and some thanks for it.

Epictetus: daily before your eyes

The Enchiridion, or Handbook, is a short digest of Epictetus’s teaching made by his student Arrian. This entry does not promise that the reminder will make you calm or brave. It names two things that get harder to do once death is in view: thinking “anything mean” and wanting anything “extravagantly.”

Both are easy to test. Take the grudge you have held against a coworker since spring, the argument you are still winning in your head, the upgrade you have been researching for three weeks. Hold any of them up against the fact that you will die, and it shrinks to its real size. That is all Epictetus claims for the practice, and it is a good deal.

Seneca: not short, but wasted

Seneca comes at death from the other side. What troubles him is not dying but reaching the end and finding that life “glided away” without being noticed (On the Shortness of Life 1). Death appears in this passage only as the moment of discovery. The practice it implies is an honest account of where your time goes, which he works through in the rest of the essay; see the guide to On the Shortness of Life, and for more of his lines, Stoic quotes about time.

He comes back to the theme often in his Letters to Lucilius. In Letter 1, put here in our own words, he says we go wrong when we picture death as lying ahead of us, since the part of life we have lived so far is death’s already. The usual English translations of the Letters are not public domain worldwide, so this site gives them only in description or labeled paraphrase.

Practicing it calmly

Marcus wants the thought to govern “every act and thought,” and Epictetus wants it “daily.” Taken literally, that sounds exhausting. In practice it can be quick: a sentence that arrives, adjusts what you were about to do, and leaves.

When to bring it to mind. Epictetus’s “daily” suggests a fixed time, and the easiest fixed time is one you already have: the first coffee, the walk to the train, the moment you open your laptop. Tie the thought to that. Marcus’s “every act” suggests a second kind of moment, the fork in the road. You notice you are about to put off the call to your brother for the fifth week, or send the sharper version of the email, or give another evening to something you will not remember. Those are the moments the reminder is for.

What to say. Use words short enough to remember and plain enough to mean. Marcus’s own, in plain English, are hard to improve on: do not act as if you had ten thousand years. Then let the sentence work on whatever is in front of you. Usually the change is small. You make the call. You cut the second paragraph of the email. You stop researching and decide.

When to stop. The practice has done its job when the next thing you do is different. If you are still turning the thought over minutes later, or it leaves you uneasy instead of clear, set it down and pick up the task in front of you. At that point it has stopped being a reminder and turned into brooding, and brooding changes nothing about the next thing you do.

Seneca suggests an evening form of the same thought, in a letter written when he notices that he has grown old:

Being able to say at bedtime that you have lived is a mild version of memento mori, with no skull and no countdown. It asks whether the day was spent on purpose. If you already look back over the day at night, the free Evening Examination is a natural home for it.

Memento mori and the people you love

The Stoics also turned the reminder toward the people they loved: Epictetus advises that when you kiss your child, you tell yourself that it is a human being you are kissing (Enchiridion 3). That is a harder exercise and needs more care; it is read in full under negative visualization.

Memento mori, memento vivere, carpe diem, amor fati

Four Latin phrases often travel together on posters and tattoos. Two are now used as names for Stoic practices; none of them is a Stoic quotation.

In the Stoic version, the first two are one thought, not opposites. Meditations 4.17 goes from “Death hangs over thee” to “be good” in three short sentences: remembering death is how you remember to live. The catch is what “live” means. For the Stoics it means acting well, not mainly having a good time, and that is where they part company with carpe diem. For more on that difference, see Stoicism and Epicureanism.

Writing about it

If you keep a notebook, a few lines are enough. Here are three prompts, each built on a passage above:

• Where was I small today: a grudge kept, a point scored, a kindness held back? (Enchiridion 21)
• What do I want so badly that I have stopped noticing what I already have? (Enchiridion 21)
• Think of someone you knew who has died and who lived well. Which of their habits could I borrow this week? (Meditations 4.48)

Answer in a sentence or two and close the notebook. More prompts are in Stoic journaling prompts.

See your life in weeks

Some people find the arithmetic more persuasive than the argument. A life-in-weeks grid gives each week of a long life one small box, and the whole of it fits on a single page. The free memento mori calendar on this site shows yours. Read it the way 4.17 reads: as a nudge toward the next good act, not as a countdown.

The guided version

The guided Memento Mori practice in Stoic Practice is part of Premium. The free daily teaching gives you one verified passage, a plain-English explanation and one practice each morning, along a 365-day path taken in order. One of the path’s 13 units, Mortality and Change, opens with Enchiridion 21 and Meditations 2.11.