Stoic quotes, verified

How we check every quotation

A Stoic quote is only as good as its source. Here is how the passages on this site are chosen and checked.

• One of four translations. George Long’s Meditations (1862) and Epictetus (1877), and Aubrey Stewart’s Seneca: On Benefits (1887) and the shorter dialogues (1889). All four are in the public domain.
• Word for word. Software compares each excerpt with the digitized text from Project Gutenberg. If the words don’t match, the passage is rejected before the site is built.
• Cuts are marked. Omitted words become an ellipsis (…). Sentences from different places are never joined silently.
• You can check. Each passage has a Copy with citation button and a Source text link to the full translation.

Long and Stewart wrote Victorian English: Long’s Marcus says thou and thy, and both favor long sentences. Smoother modern translations exist, and many are still under copyright, which is why a line you know may read differently here. Which translation of the Meditations to read compares them, and the full policy is in how we source the Stoics.

Twelve essential Stoic quotes

We chose these for range: four themes, three authors, and passages worth rereading. The famous lines have their own pages further down. Under each passage is a note in our own words.

The judgment is yours

Read Long’s “soul” as the mind, the part of you that forms judgments. Marcus’s claim is that nothing outside can reach in and rearrange it: whatever a thing comes to mean for you, the mind “makes for itself” (Meditations 5.19). That is bad news if you want to blame the traffic, and good news if you want somewhere to start.

Marcus asks himself why he is angry, and answers with a comparison. To the jaundiced, honey really does taste bitter, and a false opinion colors the world just as thoroughly for the person who holds it. The coworker who is sure you are out to get him is tasting everything through that belief. That is a reason for patience, though not for agreeing with him.

A lesson in logic as much as in ethics. From I have more the only valid conclusion is I have more: a bigger bank balance proves only that you have more money, and a better presentation proves only better speaking. Neither is a verdict on you, because “you are neither possession nor speech” (Enchiridion 44).

Being corrected

An emperor is surrounded by people with every reason to agree with him, and Marcus wrote himself a standing invitation to be contradicted. It is a good line to reread before a performance review, an argument at home or any conversation in which you are already sure you are right.

Read this beside 6.21. It answers the fear that giving way to someone else’s argument costs you your independence. Marcus counts changing your mind as no less free than holding on to an error, because the act of accepting a correction is still yours: “it is thy own” (Meditations 8.16). Nobody can change your mind for you; when it changes, you changed it.

Long’s “self-conceit” translates the Greek oiēsis, the opinion that you already know. Epictetus puts discarding it first because no one can begin to learn what they think they already know. The health example makes the point concrete: everyone has a notion of health, and the advice still conflicts. In the lines this excerpt skips, he says the same of words like good and just, and defends Plato for wanting terms defined.

Bearing what happens

The first sentence makes the claim; the rest argues for it, and the argument is less flattering than you might expect. Marcus points to people who stay firm under the same blows for poor reasons, obliviousness or a wish to look brave, and calls it a shame if wisdom can’t do what conceit manages. It is a claim about what people can bear, not a promise that bearing it will be easy.

Seneca’s answer to a skeptic who thinks the Stoic promise is too good to be true. He never says the wise person goes unattacked, only that attacks don’t get through, and he argues that strength which has been tested is the kind worth trusting. The wise person he describes is rare by his own account: later in the same essay he says one appears only at long intervals (chapter 7), and in On Tranquility of Mind 7 he says the search for one has gone on for centuries without success.

A practical image for family fights and office grudges. The wrong done to you is one handle, and a situation lifted by that handle can’t be carried. The relationship is another: a brother in Epictetus’s example, a sister or a business partner or a friend of twenty years in yours. You choose where to take hold.

How to live, and with whom

“The vulgar” is Stewart’s Victorian word for the crowd, and in the lines this excerpt skips Seneca makes clear he means the crowd at every rank, the woolen cloaks and the crowns alike. His test for a way of life is not how many people follow it but whether it holds up when the mind examines it. It is worth remembering the next time a choice is defended with everyone does it.

The excuse Epictetus answers here is still a favorite: I’ll never be great at this, so why bother? His reply uses two famous names from his world, Milo the wrestler and Croesus the king, to make a plain point. Nobody stops exercising because they won’t win at the Olympics, or stops minding their money because they won’t be the richest person alive. Being no Socrates is no reason to sell your will cheap.

Seneca’s list of what a good friend gives you, from keeping your secrets to lifting your gloom, works just as well as a test of the friend you are. The warning at the end is about the loyal complainer: someone can be firmly on your side and still sour every day you spend together.

Quotes by topic

Each topic page gathers verified passages on one subject, with a note on each and a word on the popular lines about it that turn out not to be Stoic.

For the ideas behind the lines, the guides on anger, fear and grief go further.

Famous lines, checked

Many of the most-shared Stoic quotes are not in the texts. Some are film dialogue, some are loose modern rewordings of a real passage, and some were written recently and given an ancient name. The pages below give each famous line a verdict and set the real passage beside it.

A line the checker can’t find isn’t automatically fake. Seneca’s Letters, Musonius Rufus and some chapters of the Discourses aren’t in the texts it searches, so a line credited to them may still be genuine.

Quotes by philosopher

Almost everything quoted on this site comes from three writers of the Roman imperial period, and each has a page of passages arranged by theme.

Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations in Greek as private notes, in twelve books of short sections; Long titled his translation Thoughts. Epictetus is not known to have written anything. His student Arrian recorded the teaching as the Discourses, which survive in four of what were eight or more books (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)), and the Enchiridion, or handbook, is a short digest of them.

Seneca wrote essays, traditionally called dialogues, such as On the Shortness of Life and On Anger, as well as the long treatise On Benefits and 124 letters to his friend Lucilius. The usual English translations of the Letters are not public domain everywhere, so the Letters appear here only in labeled paraphrase. So does Musonius Rufus, the teacher of Epictetus, whose lectures survive only in reports written down by others. All four are introduced on the Stoic philosophers.

How to cite the Stoics

Cite the Stoics by their traditional numbers, not by page. A page number belongs to one printing. The book and section numbers are shared by nearly every edition and translation, so a reader with a different copy can still find the line.

Scholarly editions sometimes add a third number for a paragraph, as in Discourses 2.17.1, and a few editions divide the text slightly differently. Long, for instance, prints Enchiridion 50 and 51 as one chapter, so a number that seems off by one is worth checking against a neighbor.

When you quote the words, name the translator and year as well. Marcus wrote in Greek and Seneca in Latin; the English wording belongs to the translator. Two common forms:

• In running text: “I seek the truth, by which no man was ever injured” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.21, trans. George Long, 1862).
• In a list of works: Marcus Aurelius, The Thoughts of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, translated by George Long (1862), Project Gutenberg eBook #15877.

Chicago style, among others, cites classical works by these numbers rather than by page, so use them with your guide’s punctuation. The Copy with citation button under every passage on this site copies the text with author, work, section, translator and year.

One passage a day

Twelve lines is a lot to take in at once. In Letter 2 to Lucilius, Seneca advises staying with a few writers and carrying away one thought from each day’s reading.

Today’s teaching works that way: one sourced passage for the date, a plain-English explanation and one practice to try before evening. In the app, the same teachings run as a 365-day path in thirteen units, starting at Day 1 on the day you begin.