Stoic quotes on grief and loss

The translations are George Long’s Marcus Aurelius (1862) and Epictetus (1877), and Aubrey Stewart’s Seneca (1889). An ellipsis (…) marks words left out, words in square brackets are Long’s, and the one paraphrase is labeled. None of these excerpts is quoted in our grief guide, so the two pages can be read together.

If you are looking for a line to write in a card or read at a funeral, there are suggestions near the end.

Marcus Aurelius on loss

Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations in Greek, as private notes to himself. His father died when he was small, and he and his wife Faustina had at least twelve children (Britannica (opens in a new tab)), several of whom he outlived. He seldom writes about mourning directly; he writes about memory, gratitude and how to help.

What a life leaves: Meditations 1.2

His father died so early that what Marcus took from him came through “reputation and remembrance” (Meditations 1.2): what people said about the man, and what little the boy recalled. Book 1 records debts like this one, to his grandfather, his mother (1.3) and his teachers. It is a good model for remembering someone: instead of summarizing a life, write down what you learned from it. Start with “From my mother…” and finish the sentence.

Grateful for the years: Meditations 1.17

Book 1 ends with a long list of thanks to the gods, among them a sentence about his mother. Marcus doesn’t call her early death good. He records what he was given inside it: “she spent the last years of her life with me” (Meditations 1.17). The gratitude sits beside the loss; it doesn’t replace it. Anyone who has cared for a dying parent may know this: the evenings in a hospital chair were hard, and later they can be what you are most glad of.

For missing someone: Meditations 6.48

This is about the living, but it helps with missing someone. Marcus doesn’t praise people in general; he names one quality for each. After a death, that particular list is what you keep. While people are alive it is worth making, and worth telling them what is on it: “we must keep them before us” (Meditations 6.48).

Leaves: Meditations 10.34

The verses are from Homer’s Iliad, where a warrior compares the generations of men to leaves. The chapter opens, before this excerpt, by offering them as a short reminder to be free from grief and fear, and in the lines left out Marcus applies them to critics and to posterity as well as to children. The comfort is not that a loss doesn’t matter. It is that loss is shared: “a brief existence is common to all things” (Meditations 10.34), and whoever mourns will one day be mourned. Read at a funeral, the forest putting out new leaves can say what is hard to say plainly. Read alone in the first days after a death, “Leaves, also, are thy children” may be too much; it was a note Marcus wrote to himself.

When someone else has lost something: Meditations 5.36

Don’t get swept along by how things look, Marcus tells himself, but help, “according to thy ability and their fitness” (Meditations 5.36): as far as you can, and as the case calls for. He keeps his Stoic view that losing outward things is no real harm, and helps anyway. The story of the old man and the top is unknown, but the point seems to be that he could value the toy as the child did while remembering it was only a top. You can take someone’s loss seriously for their sake, whatever your philosophy says about it. Epictetus gives similar advice in Enchiridion 16.

Epictetus on loss

The best-known lines on loss from Epictetus, Enchiridion 3 and 16, are read with care in the grief guide. The passage here is about loss of a different kind.

What you got in exchange: Discourses 4.3

Epictetus’s examples are trades: a horse for an ass, an ox for a sheep, a good action for a bit of money, and at the end a public office that went to someone else while you kept your decency. Nothing here is about the people we love, and it would be a misuse to apply it there. It is about what you give up to keep your character: the promotion that went to someone willing to cut corners, the friends who drifted away when you wouldn’t join in. Ask what you got in their place. “I possess decency, he possesses a tribuneship” (Discourses 4.3).

Seneca on grief

Seneca wrote three consolations, letters to people in mourning, summarized on our page about Seneca’s consolations. The grief guide quotes their best-known chapters; these come from others.

Say the name: Consolation to Marcia 5

Seneca quotes the advice the philosopher Areus gave Livia, the wife of Augustus, after her son Drusus died. It begins with something most bereaved people meet: friends who don’t know whether to mention the person, and so say nothing. Areus asks Livia to let them speak, and even to “encourage conversation of which he is the subject” (Consolation to Marcia 5). Then he turns to where her attention goes. Grief returns to “that last scene of all”: the hospital room, the phone call. Areus points to the whole life instead, down to “the sweet caresses of his babyhood.” At a funeral, that means telling a story from the middle of the life, not only the end.

Allowing grief: Consolation to Marcia 8

Marcia had been mourning her son for three years when Seneca wrote to her (Consolation to Marcia 1). In the lines this excerpt skips, he notices that she keeps watch over herself so that nothing eases her mind. Some people still feel that a lighter day is a betrayal. The line worth keeping is the last: there is “a great difference between allowing and forcing yourself to grieve” (Consolation to Marcia 8). The next sentence urges Marcia to set her mourning aside of her own accord, which may sound brisk; it was written to one woman, three years on. Nothing here sets a date.

What they would want: Consolation to Polybius 5

Seneca makes an argument still heard at funerals: he wouldn’t want you to suffer. He builds it from this particular brother’s affection, and allows that the dead may feel nothing at all. It can be a comfort said to yourself, or about the person in a eulogy. Said to someone else in the first week, it can sound like being told to stop. The same chapter also advises Polybius to hide his grief so that his brothers can take courage from him, advice few would give today.

Let someone in: Consolation to Helvia 19

Writing to his mother from exile, when she was grieving his absence on top of many deaths in the family, Seneca turns to her sister, the aunt who had nursed him through a long illness. His observation still holds: people in sorrow tend to “flee from those who are dearest to them” (Consolation to Helvia 19). He asks for the opposite. Let one person in, someone who will keep you company whichever way the day goes: “if you wish to nurse your grief, she will be your companion.” It may be the sister you would rather not call because she will hear it in your voice.

Letter 63, in paraphrase

Seneca wrote Letter 63 to his friend Lucilius after the death of Lucilius’s friend Flaccus. The usual English translations of the Letters are still under copyright in many countries, so we give it in paraphrase. In fairness, the letter opens by saying that not mourning at all would be the better way, though Seneca hardly dares insist on it; what he asks is that the eyes be neither dry nor overflowing. The grief guide reads the letter more fully. The paraphrase’s last sentence is for anyone who still has their people: enjoy them while you have them. Seneca tells Marcia the same in chapter 10, read on our negative visualization page.

For a card or a eulogy

Each of these lines comes from a passage on this page.

Give the translator with the line, for example: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 1.2, translated by George Long. You can shorten Long’s and Stewart’s Victorian English with an ellipsis, but don’t reword it under their names; for modern English, use a modern translation and credit it.

Misattributed and misread lines

The “do not grieve… be grateful” line

Lists of grief quotes sometimes credit Marcus Aurelius with a line telling the bereaved not to grieve but to be grateful for the moments they shared. It comes with no book or section, and we have found no source for it in the Meditations. The thought is closer to Seneca:

Seneca does press Polybius to bring his grief to an end (chapter 5, above), but in chapter 18 of the same work, read in our grief guide, he says he will never forbid mourning. The popular line asks for gratitude instead of grief. Seneca asks for gratitude alongside it.

“Light griefs are loquacious”

This one is Seneca’s, but it isn’t advice about mourning. It renders a line from his tragedy Phaedra (line 607), Curae leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent: roughly, light troubles talk and great ones leave us stunned. Phaedra says it to her stepson Hippolytus as she struggles to confess that she loves him. The Latin curae means cares or troubles; griefs was a translator’s choice. It is a character speaking in a play, and the advice Seneca holds up to Marcia is the opposite of silence: say the name, and let others say it (Consolation to Marcia 5, above).

For other lines the Stoics never wrote, see fake Stoic quotes, where you can also check a quotation yourself.

If you are grieving

If someone you love has died, what the Stoics said about grief reads Seneca’s letters to the bereaved more slowly, along with what Epictetus asked of the people around a mourner. What they wrote about death itself is in Stoic quotes on death.

Seneca argued with particular mourners about how long to grieve, but nothing on this page is a schedule. Take the line that helps and leave the rest.