Stoic quotes for hard times

Every passage below is an exact excerpt, checked word for word against the public-domain translation it comes from: Aubrey Stewart’s Seneca (1889), and George Long’s Epictetus (1877) and Marcus Aurelius (1862). An ellipsis (…) marks words left out, and square brackets mark words Long supplied. Under each passage is a short note on what it says and how it applies to an ordinary bad stretch: a layoff, a parent’s long illness, a year in which nothing goes to plan. The argument behind these lines is in our guides to failure and setbacks and fear, which use different passages.

Seneca: hardship as a test

Seneca wrote two short essays on this subject. On Providence, addressed to his friend Lucilius, asks why bad things happen to good people if the world is well ordered. On the Firmness of the Wise Man, addressed to his friend Serenus, argues that insults and injuries cannot touch the wise. Both are quoted here in Stewart’s translation.

What matters is how you bear it

Seneca’s image is the sea. Rivers, rainstorms and springs pour into it, and it stays as salt as it was. He is careful about what he claims: “I do not say that he does not feel them” (On Providence 2). The brave person feels the blow. What the blow doesn’t get to do is decide what kind of person they are. In the lines this excerpt skips, he compares good people to athletes who ask their trainers to hit hard, because strength is proved only by what it can take. The last sentence is the one people remember, and it is genuinely his. You rarely choose the rejection letter or the call from the hospital. You do choose, slowly and imperfectly, what you do in the weeks after.

The untested life

Demetrius was a Cynic philosopher Seneca knew personally, and this saying was still ringing in Seneca’s ears when he wrote. It runs against the usual envy. We tend to think the luckiest person is the one nothing bad has happened to. Demetrius thought that person was missing something: “He never has had an opportunity of testing himself” (On Providence 3). Someone whose projects have never collapsed doesn’t yet know whether they can pick up and start the next one. The gladiator makes the same point from the other side: nobody admires a win over an opponent who couldn’t fight. The rest of the essay argues that misfortune comes by destiny and for the good of the people it strikes, and that Fortune picks out the bravest. You don’t have to share that belief to use Demetrius’s saying. It is a claim about what hard things reveal, not about why they happen.

The steep path

The objection in quotation marks is about Stoicism itself: the way up is too steep. Seneca doesn’t deny the climb. He asks whether any height was ever reached on the flat, and then says the path is less sheer than it looks. His second point is about how hills look from far off. From a distance, separate hills merge into one sheer wall; up close they pull apart, and slopes appear that you couldn’t see before. A hard year often looks like the wall when you stand at the start of it: the move, the new job, the months of recovery after an operation. Taken a week at a time, it turns out to be a series of slopes. Seneca puts the rocks and cliffs in “the first part” only (On the Firmness of the Wise Man 1).

What can’t be taken

This is the hardest passage on the page. Demetrius is speaking to the gods, and the words the excerpt leaves out name what he is offering them: his children, a part of his body, his life. He is not asking anyone to feel nothing at a loss. He is refusing to count the loss as a theft, and his closing line explains why: “you cannot rob a man unless he resists” (On Providence 5). In smaller matters you can try this now. A role you have outgrown, a plan that is plainly over, a house you have to sell: you can fight each one to the last meeting, or hand it over well. The modern name for wanting what actually happens is amor fati, a phrase from Nietzsche. If the loss is a person, start instead with Stoicism and grief.

Seneca takes up the same theme in Letter 96 to Lucilius, which we describe in our own words because the Letters aren’t quoted on this site: he tells his friend to stop complaining about what happens to him, and says that to live is to serve as a soldier.

Epictetus: you were given what it takes

Epictetus was a former slave who taught philosophy at Nicopolis, in northwestern Greece, and his student Arrian wrote down the lectures we call the Discourses. Discourses 1.6 begins as an argument about providence and ends with some of his most direct words on hardship.

The work of Phidias was the great statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the famous sights of the ancient world, and people planned whole trips around seeing it. Epictetus’s list of what they put up with on the way could describe a summer music festival now: sunburn, crowds, nowhere decent to wash, rain, noise. Nobody decides the trip was a mistake because of the line for the restrooms. They weigh the discomfort against the spectacle, and they “bear and endure” (Discourses 1.6). His argument is that life is the bigger spectacle and comes with the same trade. That doesn’t make the hard parts pleasant. It puts them in proportion.

Read Long’s manliness as courage. The Greek word is andreia (Perseus (opens in a new tab) has the text), the name of the virtue the Stoics counted as one of the four. It is formed from the Greek for man, and Long translated it to the letter.

Notice the order. Epictetus doesn’t open with “Bring now, O Zeus, any difficulty.” He first looks at what he has been given, and the challenge follows from the inventory. Before a week you dread, the same order works on paper: write down the times you have already shown patience, nerve or staying power, then look at what is coming. In the lines after this excerpt, he scolds his listeners for sitting still, afraid of what might happen and lamenting what has, and then blaming the gods. His other well-known line on the subject, that it takes difficulty to show what a person is, comes in Discourses 1.24 and is discussed in Stoicism and fear.

Marcus Aurelius: what stands in the way

Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations in Greek as private notes while he was emperor, and he wrote at least some of them at war. Two notes in the text place parts of it in the field during his campaigns on the Danube frontier, one among the Quadi and one at Carnuntum.

Marcus is correcting a slide in reasoning that hard times make easy. This is hard for me quietly becomes nobody could do this. He runs it the other way: if something is possible for a human being and fits human nature, count it as within your reach too. The qualifier matters. He isn’t talking about any feat at all but about the human ones, such as patience, honesty and keeping going. Other people have cared for a parent through a long decline, rebuilt a business after it failed, gone back to school at fifty. That they managed it is information about what you can manage.

Picture a highway stopped for an hour by an accident a mile ahead, and a line of drivers leaning on their horns. Marcus’s exercise is to remember everyone who met the same trouble with outrage, as if it had never happened to anyone before, and then to ask where they are now. His answer is blunt: “Nowhere.” The point isn’t contempt. Their indignation moved nothing and didn’t outlast them. So he asks why he should copy it, and turns instead to the right use of what happened, which then becomes “a material for thee” (Meditations 7.58). The same word comes back in the next passage.

This is Marcus’s physics put to work. Nature takes whatever stands against it and fixes it into place as part of the whole. Reason, he says, can do the same: it can make “every hindrance its own material” (Meditations 8.35). For Marcus the purpose that counts is acting well (the end of 7.58 says as much), so a hindrance can wreck the plan and still serve that purpose. A layoff ends the job. It doesn’t end the chance to leave decently, to help a colleague let go in the same round, or to look for the next thing honestly. The better-known sibling of this passage is Meditations 5.20, the source of a modern slogan, which is read in full on the obstacle is the way.

Hard moment right now?

A passage is something to come back to over months. In the middle of a bad day, a few structured questions may help more. If something has happened that you can’t change, the free Outside My Control exercise has you sort what is involved into what is and isn’t up to you, let the rest go, and choose one thing to do next. Every step is optional.

If what you feel is dread about what’s coming, the Worry exercise is free as well, and so is the one for anger. For more verified passages by theme, go back to Stoic quotes.

If things are hard in a way no passage reaches, tell someone you trust. If you are in danger, contact local emergency services; in the U.S. you can call or text 988 (opens in a new tab).