What is Stoicism? A plain-English answer

Stoicism in 60 seconds

Stoicism is one of the philosophies of ancient Greece and Rome, and one of the few that people still read for advice on how to live. Its core fits on an index card:

• The goal is a flourishing life, what the Greeks called eudaimonia.
• Only character is truly good. Wisdom, justice, courage and temperance make a life good. Health, money and reputation are worth having, but they don’t make anyone good, and losing them doesn’t make anyone bad.
• Some things are up to you, and most are not. Your judgments and choices are yours. Your body, your property, your reputation and what other people do are not (Enchiridion 1).
• Your judgments shape your distress. What upsets you is usually less the event than the opinion you add to it (Enchiridion 5).
• Every person is your kin. Everyone has a share of reason, the Stoics argued, so everyone belongs to one community.
• The world is an ordered whole. The Stoics believed reason runs through nature, and they tried to live in agreement with it.
• Philosophy is practice. The point is to live differently, which takes daily exercise, not only reading.

The rest of this page takes those ideas in turn, with the ancient sources. For the full list, each with its source, see the Stoic principles.

Where Stoicism came from

Zeno of Citium, from Cyprus, began teaching in Athens around 300 BCE in the Stoa Poikilē, the Painted Porch, a colonnade with murals in the Agora, the city’s marketplace. His followers took their name from the porch. Zeno was followed as head of the school by Cleanthes and then by Chrysippus, who did the most to work it into a full system. Not one complete work by any of those first three heads of the school survives (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)).

Most of the Stoic writing we can still read comes from the Roman era, in the first and second centuries CE: Seneca’s own essays and letters, the lectures of Musonius Rufus and of Epictetus as their students wrote them down, and the private notebook of Marcus Aurelius. The Stoic philosophers covers who they were and who taught whom.

What the Stoics believed

The Stoics divided philosophy into logic, physics and ethics, and they thought the three belonged together: you can’t know how to live without knowing how to think and what kind of world you live in. Four ideas do most of the work in how they lived.

The good life comes from character

The Stoics and their rival schools agreed that the aim of life is eudaimonia. The word is usually rendered as happiness, but it describes how a life goes rather than how a day feels, and flourishing is the closer English word. Where the schools split was over what flourishing is made of. The Epicureans said pleasure. The Stoics said virtue, and nothing else: wisdom, justice, courage and temperance are the only real goods, and they are enough by themselves for a good life (SEP (opens in a new tab)).

Everything else, including health, money, reputation and even life itself, the Stoics called indifferent: neither good nor bad in itself. Some indifferents are naturally preferable, and you are free to choose health over sickness and a paycheck over poverty. What you shouldn’t do is think they make you good, or let your peace of mind depend on keeping them.

Seneca’s On the Happy Life describes what such a life looks like from the inside:

Read as a checklist, the passage turns into questions you can ask on an ordinary Tuesday. Is my mind clear, or am I running on irritation? Am I facing what needs facing? Am I looking after my body without turning it into a hobby? Am I enjoying what I have without needing it? The last question is Seneca’s final clause: “enjoy the bounty of Fortune without becoming her slave” (On the Happy Life 3). You can be glad of a raise without needing it to feel that you count, and you can lose a client without deciding that you have lost something of yourself.

Reason and nature

Living in agreement with nature is the classic Stoic description of the goal. One ancient report says Zeno defined it as living in agreement and his successor Cleanthes added with nature; another credits the full phrase to Zeno himself (SEP (opens in a new tab)). Put simply, a thing’s nature is what it is built to do, and it does well when it does that well: a good knife cuts cleanly, a good horse runs well. What human beings are built for, on this view, is reason, and the shared life that reason makes possible. Marcus Aurelius calls his own nature rational and social (Meditations 6.44), and he draws the consequence in one line:

Acting by nature and acting by reason are, for a human being, one act described twice. The Stoics also believed the universe itself is ordered by reason, which gives the phrase a second meaning: fitting in with the larger order instead of fighting it. The Seneca passage above opens on that note, with wisdom as “not departing from nature” (On the Happy Life 3). On a working day the theory reduces to a plain question: is what I’m about to do the reasonable thing, and does it take account of the other people involved?

One human community

The Stoics drew a political conclusion from reason. If every human being shares in it, then every human being belongs to one community, and the world is a kind of city (SEP (opens in a new tab)). Marcus wrote that as Antoninus, a Roman, his city was Rome, but as a human being his city was the world (Meditations 6.44). In another entry he uses the image of a body:

Marcus’s contrast is between melos, a limb, and meros, a part, two Greek words one letter apart; the ellipses mark where Long’s text gives the Greek. Think of a hired caterer at a family wedding and the bride’s brother carrying chairs. Both are helping. The caterer helps because it is the job, the brother because the day is his too. Marcus wants your kindness to be the second kind, done not “as a thing of propriety” but as “doing good to thyself” (Meditations 7.13). That is where justice, one of the four virtues, starts, and it is why the coworker who gets on your nerves still belongs to the same body as you.

Fate and providence, in brief

The Stoics believed the universe is a single living whole, run by a divine reason they called god, Zeus or nature, and that everything happens through an unbroken chain of causes, which they called fate (SEP (opens in a new tab)). That sounds like a recipe for passivity, but they denied it. Chrysippus, as Cicero reports in On Fate (42–43), explained this with a cylinder: a push starts it moving, but it rolls the way it does because of its own shape. In the same way, events put impressions in front of your mind, but whether you assent to them is up to you. What happens to you is not your choice. How you take it is.

Marcus turns the idea into a question about your role:

Take a reorganization at work that nobody asked you about. It goes ahead either way, and on Marcus’s view even the people dragging their feet are part of how it unfolds. The choice left to you is the one in his last line, “among what kind of workmen thou placest thyself” (Meditations 6.42).

Is Stoicism a religion?

No. Stoicism is a philosophy, but its ancient form included a theology, because the Stoics identified god with the reason that orders the world. Many modern readers practice the exercises without that theology, and Is Stoicism a religion? explains what the Stoics believed about God and fate, and what carries over without that belief.

What Stoicism is not

The everyday word stoic has drifted a long way from the philosophy. Three misreadings come up most often.

Not emotionless. Lowercase stoic means keeping a straight face through pain. The Stoics aimed at something else: freedom from passions built on false judgments, such as rage, panic and envy, not freedom from feeling. Seneca ends the chapter quoted earlier by saying that once the things that excite and alarm us are driven out, joy, peace and kindliness follow (On the Happy Life 3). Are Stoics emotionless? takes this further.

Not passive. Accepting what you can’t change is only half of the dichotomy of control. The other half is putting real effort into what you can. The Stoics also expected the wise to take part in public life, and Seneca sets the rules of the two rival founders side by side:

Notice where each founder sets the default. For Epicurus you stay out unless there is a reason to get involved; for Zeno you get involved unless there is a reason you can’t. Seneca served as a senator and as Nero’s adviser, Marcus spent years with his armies on the northern frontier, and Epictetus ran a school. None of them treated Stoicism as permission to stay out of things.

Not a hustle philosophy. Online, stoic often means grinding, dominating and cutting people off. The texts point the other way. Justice and temperance are half of the four virtues, Marcus wants you to do good to others for its own sake, and the measure of a life is character, not income or status. Toxic Stoicism vs. the real thing sets the internet version against the sources.

Common questions about Stoicism

Three questions come up so often that each has its own page.

What it means to practice Stoicism

The ancient Stoics would not have called someone a Stoic for agreeing with the ideas above. Epictetus is blunt about anyone who is proud of being able to explain Chrysippus:

Swap Chrysippus for any book on your nightstand, this page included, and the point still stands. Much of Stoic practice was repetition at fixed points in the day. Marcus opens one notebook entry by preparing, in the morning, for the difficult people he will meet (Meditations 2.1). The Enchiridion, the short digest of Epictetus’s teaching made by his student Arrian, takes its title from the Greek for handbook: something to keep close at hand. Seneca reviewed each day at night before sleep (On Anger 3.36).

A modern version can be just as plain:

• In the morning, read one short passage and choose one thing to practice.
• During the day, when something goes wrong, ask which part of it is up to you and which virtue it calls for.
• At night, review the day honestly, without punishing yourself.

Take a canceled train on the way to an important meeting. The cancellation is not up to you, and neither is your manager’s mood. The message you send, what you do with the forty minutes and the way you walk in late are. That small sort is Stoicism in practice.

For the daily method step by step, see how to practice Stoicism. Stoicism in daily life works through more ordinary moments, such as a sharp email or a colleague who takes the credit. The practice library describes the exercises the Stoics used, and Stoicism for beginners lays out a four-week start.