The Stoic principles, in plain English

These are the seventeen principles the Stoic Practice app is built on, and each of its 365 days is tagged with one of them. The list is our arrangement, not an ancient one. The Stoics taught philosophy in three parts, logic, physics and ethics, and nearly everything here belongs to the ethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). But every principle comes from the surviving texts. The sections below show the passages they rest on, in public-domain translations, and say plainly when a label is modern.

The principles in one minute

1. Dichotomy of control. Some things are up to you and most are not. Put your effort where it counts.
2. Objective judgment. Events arrive with a verdict attached. The verdict is yours to examine.
3. Inner freedom. No one can force your judgment or make your choices for you.
4. Virtue is the only good. Character is what makes a life good. Health, money and reputation are worth preferring, but they are not good in themselves.
5. Wisdom. Knowing what actually matters, and what the situation in front of you calls for.
6. Courage. Holding to what is right through fear, pain and disapproval.
7. Justice. Fairness, honesty and goodwill toward everyone, strangers included.
8. Temperance. Right measure in pleasure, desire, speech and possessions.
9. Shared humanity. Every person shares in reason, so all people belong to one community.
10. Roles and duties. Your relationships tell you what is yours to do.
11. The present moment. Now is the only time you can live in or act in.
12. Change and impermanence. Everything changes, including what you love and you yourself.
13. Memento mori. Remembering death keeps your priorities honest.
14. Amor fati. Wish for things to happen as they do, and act well in what follows.
15. Living according to nature. Live as a reasoning, social being, and as part of a larger whole.
16. Self-examination. Review your own conduct honestly, without punishing yourself.
17. Practice and progress. Character is built by repeated action, not by reading.

Read in order, they make one argument. If the only things fully up to you are your judgments and choices (1 to 3), then the good of your life has to lie there, in your character (4 to 8). Character shows in how you deal with other people (9 and 10) and in how you use the time you have (11 to 14). Taken together, that is what the Stoics meant by living according to nature (15). The last two principles are how you get better at all of it.

Control and judgment

Three principles about what is yours. They are where Epictetus starts, and where most people who take up Stoicism start too.

Dichotomy of control

Epictetus’s Enchiridion, the short handbook of his teaching compiled by his student Arrian, opens by dividing everything into two kinds.

The lines skipped in this excerpt name what is in our power: opinion, the impulse to act, desire and aversion, in a word our own acts (Enchiridion 1). The other list covers most of what people worry about: the body, property, reputation and office, meaning position. Before a job interview, your preparation, your honesty and how you speak to the receptionist are on the first list. Whether they hire you is on the second. You can care about the outcome and still refuse to stake your peace on it.

“Dichotomy of control” is a modern name for this division; Epictetus doesn’t use the phrase. The dichotomy of control guide covers the idea in depth and has a free exercise for sorting a real problem.

Objective judgment

Something happens, and an impression arrives with it, verdict included: he insulted me, this ruins everything. The Stoics called accepting that verdict assent and treated it as a step of its own. The impression shows up whether you want it or not. Whether you sign off on it is up to you. Marcus Aurelius locates harm in exactly that place.

The entry makes two moves. First, harm “does not subsist in the ruling principle of another” (Meditations 4.39): what someone else thinks of you happens in their mind, not in yours. Second, a test. Whatever “can happen equally to the bad man and the good” (Meditations 4.39) can’t decide whether a life goes well. A layoff or a canceled flight lands on decent people and scoundrels alike.

In practice this means describing events before judging them. A friend hasn’t answered your message in two days. The fact is that no reply has come. “She’s annoyed with me” is something you added, and you may be wrong. Epictetus gave the idea its best-known form in Enchiridion 5: people are troubled not by things but by their opinions about things.

Inner freedom

Epictetus was enslaved for part of his life (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)), and freedom is one of his constant subjects. The long discourse that George Long titles “About Freedom” (Discourses 4.1) argues that the free person is the one who can’t be compelled. Marcus, an emperor, wrote the image many readers remember:

A citadel is the walled stronghold at the top of a city, the part that holds after the rest has fallen. Marcus’s claim is narrow, and that is its strength. Other people can make your life hard. They can’t make you agree that something is shameful, or choose your answer for you.

Suppose a manager pushes you to sign off on figures you think are wrong. He controls your bonus, maybe your job. Whether your name goes on the report is still your decision. The pressure is real, but it has to pass through your judgment. Marcus thinks even plain obstinacy can hold that ground, and a mind that judges “aided by reason and deliberately” (Meditations 8.48) holds it far better. That is why the Stoics trained judgment.

The good: virtue and the four virtues

Virtue is the only good

This is the most demanding Stoic claim, and the one most often misread. The Stoics held that only virtue, meaning excellence of character, is good, and only vice is bad. Everything else, including health, wealth, reputation and even life itself, they called indifferent (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). Seneca tries out several ways of saying it:

Look near the end of the passage: the good is the one “which he is able to bestow upon himself” (On the Happy Life 4). Character is the one good nobody else has to hand you and nobody can take. Marcus’s test from 4.39, above, comes at the same point from the other side.

Indifferent does not mean unimportant. The mainstream Stoic view was that health, money and a good name are preferred: it is natural and right to choose them over sickness, poverty and disgrace, and to work for them sensibly. They just don’t decide whether you live well. In English they are usually called preferred indifferents, from the Greek proēgmena. A rich, healthy person can live badly, and a sick, poor one can live well.

Epictetus thought the doctrine was easy to recite and hard to hold:

The gap he points to is between the lecture and the laugh. You can explain that reputation is indifferent and still burn when someone mocks you. Closing that gap is the work of the last section on this page.

Wisdom, courage, justice and temperance

The Stoics kept the four main virtues Plato had named in the Republic and treated each as a kind of knowledge. Courage, for instance, is knowing what should be endured and what should be feared. Wisdom is knowing what is good, what is bad and what is neither. Justice governs what we owe other people, all of them and not only friends. Temperance keeps appetite, speech and possessions in proportion.

Because all four rest on the same knowledge, the Stoics held that they can’t be separated: whoever truly has one has them all (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). In practice they work less like four ideals than like four questions to put to one decision. The four virtues guide covers each one, with Marcus’s own lists and a free exercise.

Living with others

Shared humanity

Marcus builds this principle as a chain of ifs.

If people share reason, they share a law; if they share a law, they are fellow citizens; and so the world is “in a manner a state” (Meditations 4.4). Scholars call this Stoic cosmopolitanism, from the Greek for a citizen of the world. It means justice doesn’t stop at your family, your country or the people you like.

It also changes how you meet the people who annoy you. The customer who was rude on the phone and the driver who cut you off belong, on Marcus’s view, to the same city you do. That doesn’t mean approving of what they did. It means your answer starts from kinship, which rules out contempt. For the hard cases, see difficult people.

Roles and duties

Epictetus offers a plain method for working out what to do: look at the names you carry.

Each of your names, he says, “marks out the proper duties” (Discourses 2.10). The Stoics’ technical term for these was kathēkonta, usually translated “appropriate actions” or “proper functions”: what it is fitting for someone in your position to do. Epictetus says elsewhere that they are measured by our relationships (Enchiridion 30), and the glossary has more on the term. Notice the order. Before son, brother or senator comes human being, whose highest power is what Long translates as “the will”: the faculty of choice. Next comes citizen of the world.

The question turns vague good intentions into something you can act on. Before a hard conversation with your teenage son, ask what being his parent asks of you here, not what would win the argument. Before you answer a sharp email from your brother, remember that you are writing as his sibling, not as the person who was right about the holiday plans.

Living in time

The present moment

Marcus reminds himself that “every man lives only this present time, which is an indivisible point” (Meditations 3.10). The past is finished and the future is uncertain, so the present is the only place where anything can be done. In Meditations 2.14 he makes a related point: the present is the only thing anyone can lose, since no one can be robbed of a past or future he doesn’t have.

This is not a slogan about savoring the moment. Marcus pairs it with the shortness of life and the smallness of fame, and the point is practical: the task in front of you is the one you can do well. When your mind is three weeks ahead, rehearsing a conversation that may never happen, the principle sends it back to today’s work. For more on that pattern, see worry.

Change and impermanence

Marcus’s examples are domestic. There is no hot bath unless the wood burns, and no meal unless the food is transformed. You depend on change every hour and resent it mainly when it happens to you or to what you love. His conclusion is that your own changes belong to the same process that makes everything else possible, and elsewhere he counts growing old and dying among them (Meditations 9.3).

Seeing change as the ordinary condition of things doesn’t make losses painless. It does mean they arrive as part of how the world works, not as an outrage. A child leaves home, a team is reorganized, a parent grows frail: each is a change you can meet. The Stoics also rehearsed such changes in advance (Enchiridion 3 is one example); that practice now goes by the modern name negative visualization. For loss itself, see grief.

Memento mori

Marcus uses death here as a deadline on his character, not as a gloomy thought. The entry reads like a progress report: he will die soon, and he is still not simple, not calm, not kind to everyone. Death makes the unfinished list urgent. Memento mori, Latin for “remember that you will die,” is a later traditional label. The Stoics practiced the thought without the slogan. The memento mori guide covers the practice, and the memento mori calendar shows a life in weeks.

Amor fati

Amor fati, “love of fate,” is the phrase of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, not of any ancient Stoic. The attitude it names is older. Epictetus advises wishing for things to happen as they actually happen, not as you would like them to (Enchiridion 8, in our words). Marcus’s version says it is always in your power “piously to acquiesce in thy present condition” (Meditations 7.54).

Notice what else is in that sentence. In the same breath Marcus asks himself to deal justly with the people around him and to examine every thought that comes in. Acceptance, on this reading, is where acting well begins, not where it stops. The amor fati guide goes further.

Living according to nature

This was the Stoics’ own formula for the goal of life. The school’s founder, Zeno, or his successor Cleanthes (the sources differ), defined that goal as living in agreement with nature (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). “Nature” had two senses. One is the order of the whole world, which the Stoics identified with a divine reason they also called god or Zeus; is Stoicism a religion explains that side. The other is human nature, and Epictetus spells out what it asks.

A human being, on this account, is “A rational and mortal being” (Discourses 2.9). In the lines that follow, Epictetus says that acting in a quarrelsome, harmful or violent way sinks you to the wild beast, and acting gluttonously, lewdly or rashly sinks you to the sheep. Either way you break “the promise of a man’s nature” (Discourses 2.9).

So living according to nature doesn’t mean returning to the woods or doing whatever comes easily. It means using your reason well and living as the social creature you are: thinking before you act, and acting for others as well as yourself. Marcus makes the same point on a morning when he would rather stay under the blankets: he tells himself he is getting up to do the work of a human being (Meditations 5.1, in our words).

Training

Self-examination

Marcus’s review covers a whole life: how he has treated the people in it, and what he has come through. The daily version is Seneca’s. After the lamp is taken away, he goes over the whole day, hides nothing from himself, and acts as his own judge: he pardons himself this time and gives himself advice for next time (On Anger 3.36).

The aim is honest accounting, not self-punishment. The Evening Examination on this site turns Seneca’s habit into five short questions you can answer in a few minutes, and Stoic journaling covers keeping the answers.

Practice and progress

Every habit grows by the actions that match it. To weaken one, stop feeding it and put something else in its place. Epictetus’s measure of progress is modest and countable: “count the days on which you have not been angry” (Discourses 2.18). Fewer bad days is progress, even if none of them is perfect.

Recall the passage on indifferents above: anyone can recite the doctrine. These two principles are the answer to that problem. You learn Stoicism the way you learn an instrument, by doing a little most days, and you check your progress at night. That is why the Stoic texts are full of exercises, and why a Stoic daily routine matters more than any single book.

From principle to practice

Each principle has a practice that trains it and situations that test it. The practices are in the practice library; the situation guides apply the principles to particular problems.

Three of these practices are free in the app and on this site: the dichotomy of control, the four virtues and the Evening Examination. The other practices have original guides here; in the app, their guided versions are part of Premium.