Stoicism Life Hacks ∙ What is Stoicism?
How can I be Stoic?

“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.” — Epictetus, Enchiridion 5 (tr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson)

What is Stoicism?

Stoicism is an ancient Greek school of philosophy that the Romans later took up. Its central claim is about what makes a life good. For the Stoics, virtue “is necessary and sufficient for happiness”, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s summary: things like health, wealth and reputation are neither good nor bad in themselves. Only virtue is good.

That is why the Stoic advice most people meet is about attention and judgement: noticing which things are up to you, and how much of what upsets you comes from your view of an event rather than the event itself.

Where it came from

The school was founded around 300 BC by Zeno of Citium, who had studied with the Cynic Crates. Its name comes from the Stoa Poikilê, a porch in the agora at Athens decorated with mural paintings, where the first Stoics met and lectured.

Almost nothing of the early Stoics survives whole. The three voices most people read today are Roman-era, and very different from one another:

• Epictetus, a teacher who spent part of his life as the slave of an official at Nero’s court. His teaching survives through his student Arrian, in the Greek Discourses and a short digest of them, the Enchiridion or Handbook.
• Seneca, Nero’s tutor and later one of his advisers, who wrote letters, essays and tragedies.
• Marcus Aurelius, the second-century emperor, whose Meditations were, as most scholars now read them, written for his own moral improvement.

The ideas behind most Stoic advice

Most modern Stoic advice rewords a handful of ideas.

• Some things are up to us, and some are not. The Enchiridion opens with it: “There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power.” Within our power, it goes on, are “opinion, aim, desire, aversion”; beyond it are “body, property, reputation, office”.
• The virtues. In Diogenes Laertius’s account of the Stoics (tr. A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley), the virtues are “prudence, justice, courage, moderation and the rest”, and the Stoics held that they are the only true goods.
• Picturing loss. Epictetus suggests reminding yourself what the things you love really are: “if you embrace your child or your wife, that you embrace a mortal—and thus, if either of them dies, you can bear it.” Seneca makes the same point in Letter 98, about regarding “children, or wife, or property” with the idea that we will not necessarily have them always.
• The judgement behind the feeling. Marcus Aurelius, 8.47: “If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it.”
• Remembering death. Marcus, 4.17: “Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.”

A line often credited to Marcus, “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts”, comes from Jeremy Collier’s free translation of 1701, at Meditations 3.9, where George Long’s translation begins: “Reverence the faculty which produces opinion.” Long’s nearest line is 5.16: “Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of thy mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.”

Two labels often attached to Stoicism

• Amor fati, “love of fate”, is a phrase from Nietzsche. In The Gay Science (1882), §276, he wrote: “Amor fati: let that henceforth be my love!” The Latin words do not appear in Seneca’s surviving works, and Epictetus taught in Greek. The attitude is close to Epictetus, though: “Demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well” (Enchiridion 8).
• “The inner citadel” is the title of Pierre Hadot’s book on the Meditations. The image is Marcus’s own: “the mind which is free from passions is a citadel” (Meditations 8.48).

A Stoic day, in practice

The texts describe a few small habits. None of them needs special equipment, and people take what is useful and leave the rest.

1. In the morning, expect friction. Marcus, 2.1: “Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.” He goes on to say that none of them can injure him.
2. Sort the day’s worries into what is within your power and what is not, as the first line of the Enchiridion does.
3. Picture losing something you value, in the way Epictetus describes with the favourite cup: “it is but a cup of which you are fond of—for thus, if it is broken, you can bear it.”
4. When something stings, look for the judgement underneath it (Meditations 8.47), and ask whether it holds.
5. Choose company with care. Seneca, Letter 7: “Associate with those who will make a better man of you.”
6. Review the day at night. In On Anger 3.36, Seneca describes the custom of the philosopher Sextius, who asked himself each evening: “What bad habit of yours have you cured to-day? What vice have you checked? In what respect are you better?” Seneca says he does the same, once the lamp is out and his wife has fallen silent.

Seneca also names the trap the practice is meant to avoid (Letter 98): “It is tragic for the soul to be apprehensive of the future and wretched in anticipation of wretchedness, consumed with an anxious desire that the objects which give pleasure may remain in its possession to the very end.”

Why it keeps coming back

Stoicism has a real place in the history of modern talking therapy. Albert Ellis, who founded rational emotive behaviour therapy, named Epictetus as a forerunner, and later said he had brought Epictetus “out of near-obscurity”. Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, wrote in his first book on it that its “philosophical underpinnings go back thousands of years, certainly to the time of the Stoics”.

That lineage is also a limit. Stoicism is a philosophy, not a treatment. It can help with the ordinary friction of life; it is not a substitute for care if you are struggling with your mental health.

Where to start reading

All three are free online in older translations:

• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, tr. George Long (Project Gutenberg).
• Epictetus, Enchiridion, tr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Project Gutenberg). It is short, and it is an abridgment: the Stanford Encyclopedia calls it “a much attenuated account” of the Discourses, which are the fuller record.
• Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, tr. Richard M. Gummere (Wikisource), and On Anger, tr. Aubrey Stewart (Wikisource).

Our verified Stoic quote of the day draws only on these translations, with a book and section number for every line.

Sources

• Epictetus, The Enchiridion, tr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Project Gutenberg eBook 45109), sections 1, 3, 5 and 8.
• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, tr. George Long (Project Gutenberg eBook 15877), 2.1, 3.9, 4.17, 5.16, 8.47 and 8.48.
• Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, tr. Richard M. Gummere (Wikisource), Letters 7 and 98; Of Anger, Book III, tr. Aubrey Stewart (1900; Wikisource), section 36.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Stoicism”, “Epictetus”, “Seneca” and “Marcus Aurelius”; the Diogenes Laertius passage on the virtues is quoted there in A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley’s translation (The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987, 58A).
• Marcus Aurelius, Emperor Marcus Antoninus His Conversation with Himself, tr. Jeremy Collier (London, 1701), Book III, section IX (Internet Archive scan).
• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom (The Gay Science), tr. Thomas Common (Project Gutenberg eBook 52881), §276; Seneca’s Latin works as published on The Latin Library, searched for amor fati.
• Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, tr. Michael Chase (Harvard University Press).
• Andrea E. Cavanna and colleagues, “The Western origins of mindfulness therapy in ancient Rome”, Neurological Sciences (2023), for Ellis and Beck.

Checked September 2026. Every quotation on this page was matched against the translation named beside it.