Stoic quotes on death

The passages on this page come from George Long’s translations of Marcus Aurelius (1862) and Epictetus (1877) and Aubrey Stewart’s Seneca (1889), all in the public domain. Each is an exact excerpt: an ellipsis (…) marks words left out, and words in square brackets are Long’s own. Seneca’s Letters are described in our own words rather than quoted, for reasons given below. Under each passage is a short note in our own words.

If you came here after a death, you may want to start with the note for those who are grieving at the end of the page.

Marcus Aurelius on death

Marcus Aurelius was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 CE, and the Meditations are notes he wrote to himself in Greek. Death comes up in them again and again: his own, other people’s, and that of the famous men who came before him. He seldom sounds afraid of it. What he does, over and over, is reason with himself about it.

Only the present can be lost: Meditations 2.14

Marcus stretches the numbers as far as they will go, to thousands upon thousands of years, and the result doesn’t change. Death can take only what you have, and “a man cannot lose either the past or the future” (Meditations 2.14). By that reckoning a long life and a short one end by giving up the same small thing.

It is cool logic, and it won’t answer every feeling about a life that ended early. Its use is closer to home. The life you expect to have after the promotion or the move will also be lived one present moment at a time, so this one counts as much as any of those will.

Live the rest as a remainder: Meditations 7.56

A thought experiment in one sentence. Suppose your life ended today and was complete as it stands. Whatever time comes after is extra, and Marcus’s instruction is to spend it “according to nature,” which for a Stoic means by reason and virtue. Counted as extra, an afternoon looks different: the grudge you were nursing and the sharp email you were about to send seem less worth the time.

A popular modern translation turns this into a short line about thinking of yourself as already dead. It is genuine Marcus, and our note on that version compares the wordings.

Death as a work of nature: Meditations 9.3

Marcus puts dying on the same list as growing teeth, going gray and giving birth: one of the things a body does in its season. Despise here means to look down on. He names three ways to get death wrong, and they pull in different directions: not caring, wanting it to hurry, and scorning it. What is left is the last line’s image, a father waiting for his child to be born.

If there is nothing, or something else: Meditations 8.58

A two-sentence argument against the fear of death. Marcus doesn’t claim to know what happens. He takes both possibilities in turn: if there is no sensation, you will feel no harm; if there is some other kind of sensation, you haven’t stopped living. Either way, the loss you dread never arrives as something you suffer.

The first half echoes Epicurus, who had argued centuries earlier that death is nothing to us, since where it is, we are not. Marcus often weighs that view of the world against the Stoic one (as in 9.39), and in 7.32 he sums up the options in a line: death is either extinction or change. For how the two schools differ, see Stoicism vs. Epicureanism.

Three acts are the whole play: Meditations 12.36

The Meditations end here. An actor is sent off after the third act and objects that the play has five, the conventional number: the Roman poet Horace laid it down that a play should have five acts, no more and no fewer (Ars Poetica 189–190 (opens in a new tab)). In the words the excerpt leaves out, Marcus answers that the length is set by the one who composed the play, not by the actor, and that in life “the three acts are the whole drama” (Meditations 12.36).

The passage answers a feeling most people know, that a life is incomplete until its plans are finished. Marcus’s reply is that completeness was never measured by the plans.

What to fear instead: Meditations 12.1

Marcus doesn’t tell himself to stop being afraid. He tells himself to be afraid of the right thing: not that he must one day cease to live, but “never to have begun to live according to nature” (Meditations 12.1). This passage is the source of a much-shared line that Marcus never wrote in that form; see below.

Epictetus on death

Epictetus was a slave in his youth and later a teacher, and he wrote nothing himself; his student Arrian recorded his lectures as the Discourses and condensed them into the Enchiridion, or handbook. His best-known remark about death is in Enchiridion 5: death is nothing terrible, and the terrible thing is our opinion that it is. The two passages below come at that idea from different sides.

Listen for the captain: Enchiridion 7

A ship has anchored and someone has gone ashore to fetch water. Wandering the beach is allowed, and so is picking things up; losing track of the ship is not. Read the captain’s call as death, and the shells as everything you come to love on the way.

Epictetus’s examples climb from a shellfish to a wife and child, and the jump can sound cold, especially to someone who has lost one. If it does, our guide to grief reads his hardest sayings on loss beside his gentler ones.

Death can’t be escaped; fear can: Discourses 1.27

“I cannot escape from death” is his answer after asking where on earth death doesn’t visit, and finding nowhere. The second sentence moves the effort to where it can do some good. Dying is not optional; dying “lamenting and trembling” (Discourses 1.27) is. Earlier in the same discourse he gives a rule to keep ready for when death appears to be an evil: death is a necessary thing. The appearance, not the death, is what can be worked on. What the Stoics taught about fear reads the rest of this discourse.

Seneca on death

Seneca was a Roman statesman, a writer and the tutor of the young Nero. Much of what he wrote about death is in his consolations, essays sent to people in mourning, and in his Letters to Lucilius. The usual English translations of the Letters are still under copyright in many countries, so the one letter below is described in our own words rather than quoted.

The dead suffer nothing: Consolation to Marcia 19

Marcia had lost her son three years before Seneca wrote to her; her father was the historian Cremutius Cordus. This chapter takes up a fear mourners carry for the dead themselves. The underworld of the poets, with its darkness, fire and judgment seat, is a fable, Seneca says; the dead are at rest, as they were before they were born. It is a consolation about someone already gone, written to comfort the people left behind.

A few lines past this excerpt he adds that death is neither a good nor a bad thing. The conclusion is the standard Stoic one: death belongs among the indifferents, the things that are neither virtue nor vice.

We call it sudden: Consolation to Polybius 11

Polybius held high office at the court of the emperor Claudius, and his brother had recently died. Seneca answers the complaint that the death came without warning: funerals pass us every day, “yet we take no notice of them” (Consolation to Polybius 11).

In the lines the excerpt leaves out, he tells of a father who, hearing that his son had died, said he had known when he fathered the boy that he would die someday, and added that this was what he had raised him for. Seneca calls it wisdom and courage. Many readers will find it hard. It reads better as a picture of where Seneca hoped a mind could get to than as a standard for anyone in fresh grief, and in chapter 18 of the same work he says he would never forbid mourning.

We die every day: Letter 24

The much-shared idea that we die a little every day is genuine Seneca. It comes near the end of Letter 24 to Lucilius (section 20), and since we don’t quote a translation of the Letters, here it is in our own words. Each day takes some part of our life away, even while we are still growing, so dying is something we are already doing. The last drop doesn’t empty a water clock by itself; everything that ran out before it did. In the same way, our last hour doesn’t bring about death on its own. It only completes it.

The letter begins somewhere more ordinary, with a lawsuit Lucilius was worried about; what the Stoics taught about worry takes up that half.

Too short for quarrels: On Anger 3.43

The last chapter of On Anger uses death to settle something ordinary: a quarrel. Seneca runs through pairs who resent each other, master and slave, patron and client, and tells them to wait a little, because death is coming to make them all equal. He also notes that a cry of fire in the neighborhood often ends a quarrel, since nobody has time for small fights when something larger threatens. Death, on his argument, is that larger thing, and it is always on its way.

The long feud with a brother, the standoff with a neighbor over a fence, the reply-all argument at work: each is being fought by two people who will both be gone before long. More of what Seneca wrote about anger is in Stoic quotes on anger.

Lines they didn’t write

Several of the most-shared death quotes credited to the Stoics aren’t theirs, and a few genuine ones circulate in a modern translator’s words.

“Death smiles at us all.” In Gladiator, the fictional general Maximus credits the line to a man he once knew, who turns out to be Marcus. It isn’t in the Meditations. Both of the film’s famous lines are traced on our page about the Gladiator quotes.

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” Marcus didn’t write this sentence; George Long did, summarizing Meditations 12.1 in the essay on Marcus’s philosophy printed with his translation. Set it beside 12.1 above, and see the full verdict for what was cut.

Memento mori. Latin for “remember that you must die.” It isn’t a quotation from Marcus, who wrote in Greek, or from Epictetus, who taught in Greek. It is a later traditional name for a practice they did write about, and the memento mori page gathers those passages, including Meditations 2.11 and 4.17. The memento mori calendar shows a life as a grid of weeks.

Modern translations. The popular line about being able to leave life at any moment, and letting that guide what you do, is genuine Marcus: a modern translation of Meditations 2.11. That translation is under copyright, so we describe it rather than quote it; Long’s wording is on the memento mori page. The line about thinking of yourself as already dead is 7.56, shown above in Long’s words.

If you are grieving

Two of these passages come from Seneca’s consolations to people in mourning, and several of the others can sound harsher read cold off a page than they do in context. If you are here because someone has died, what the Stoics said about grief reads their letters to the bereaved with more care than a list of quotations can, and Stoic quotes on grief gathers passages about loss and remembering.

Philosophy can keep you company, but it is no substitute for people. If thoughts of death are pressing on you, please don’t wait: talk to someone you trust today, or use the numbers in the note at the top of this page.