THE ARTICLE · 5 MIN
Stoic writers had a great deal to say about fear, and their lines are shared widely, sometimes without a book, a section or a translator attached.
So here are eight ordinary fears, each with what a Stoic wrote about it and where to find it: the book and section, in a translation old enough to be free to read. That way you can read each line in context rather than take our word for it.
Six of the eight answers are in the texts. Two popular answers are not Stoic: amor fati is Nietzsche’s phrase, and “you have power over your mind, not outside events” is not in the Meditations.
The English quotations come from these translations: George Long for Marcus Aurelius, Thomas Wentworth Higginson for Epictetus, Richard M. Gummere for Seneca’s letters, and John W. Basore for Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life.
The method, briefly
Every real passage below has a book and a section number. The two marked as myths have neither. For the Marcus Aurelius line, we searched George Long’s translation of the Meditations and the older Casaubon translation on Project Gutenberg for “power over your mind” and “outside events”, and found neither phrase.
Where a shared English version has drifted from the original, the entry says what was dropped. In the two cases on this page where that happens, the words that went missing are the qualifying ones: “more often” in Seneca, and the calm second half of Marcus’s sentence about the last day. In our reading, a qualifier makes a sentence longer, and a shorter line is easier to share.
The one worth reading in full
Seneca’s line about imagination is widely shared, and the shared version is often trimmed in a way that changes what it claims.
Plura sunt, Lucili, quae nos terrent quam quae premunt, et saepius opinione quam re laboramus.
“There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
— Seneca, Letters to Lucilius 13.4, translated by Richard M. Gummere
A version shared widely online reads “We suffer more in imagination than in reality.” Two things go missing.
“More often” becomes “more.” The Latin saepius is the comparative of saepe, “often”, so it means “more often”. In our reading, Seneca is counting occasions, not measuring intensity: he does not claim that imagined suffering is worse than real suffering.
The comparison disappears. The first half of his sentence does the work: more things frighten us than crush us. That is an observation about the gap between threat and outcome.
Seneca also says straight away how he means it: “I am not speaking with you in the Stoic strain but in my milder style.” And in the next section, 13.5, he sorts the problem into three: “some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all.”
The Letters to Lucilius come from the last years of Seneca’s life, the period from 62 to 65 CE that he spent in retirement, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Gummere’s translation gives this one the title “On groundless fears”.
What this does not do
Stoicism is a philosophy, not a treatment. It offers ways of thinking about fear. It is not a substitute for care.
If fear is running your life — if you are avoiding things you need to do, not sleeping, or feeling it in your body most days — that is something a doctor or a therapist can help with.
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is one such treatment, and it grew partly out of these ideas. Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, the founders of rational emotive behaviour therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy, both acknowledged Stoicism as the philosophical precursor of their approaches. Beck opened his first book on cognitive therapy by writing that its “philosophical underpinnings go back thousands of years, certainly to the time of the Stoics, who considered man’s conceptions (or misconceptions) of events rather than the events themselves as the key to his emotional upsets”. The treatments were then tested: a 2012 review of 106 meta-analyses found that “the strongest support exists for CBT of anxiety disorders”, among other problems.
Putting the passages to use
The passages above describe a few checks you can run on a fear of your own. None of them needs any belief in Stoicism.
- Sort it. Epictetus opens the Enchiridion by dividing things into two kinds. Within our power are “opinion, aim, desire, aversion”; beyond it are “body, property, reputation, office”. He puts reputation beyond our power, which bears directly on the first fear in the table.
- Name which of Seneca’s three it is. Is it tormenting you more than it ought, before it ought, or when it ought not to at all (Letters 13.5)?
- Look for the judgement. Marcus, at 8.47, locates the pain not in the external thing but in “thy own judgment about it”, and says it is in your power to wipe that judgement out.
- Read the passage before you share the line. A book and section number lets you read a quotation in context in a few minutes. The two myths in the table are what that check catches.
Sources
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.69, 8.47, 9.3 and 12.4, trans. George Long (Project Gutenberg #15877); the Casaubon translation (Project Gutenberg #2680), searched.
- Epictetus, Enchiridion 1, 8, 9 and 11, trans. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Project Gutenberg #45109).
- Seneca, Epistulae Morales 13.4–5, Latin text (The Latin Library); Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 13, trans. Richard M. Gummere (Wikisource).
- Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, chapters 1 and 7, trans. John W. Basore (Loeb, 1932; Wikisource), with Basore’s note on Paulinus.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom (The Gay Science) §276, trans. Thomas Common (Project Gutenberg #52881); Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Clever” §10, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (Project Gutenberg #52190); Beyond Good and Evil §9, trans. Helen Zimmern (Project Gutenberg #4363).
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Epictetus” and “Seneca”.
- Wiktionary, “saepius”.
- Andrea E. Cavanna and colleagues, “The Western origins of mindfulness therapy in ancient Rome”, Neurological Sciences (2023), on Ellis and Beck.
- Stefan G. Hofmann and colleagues, “The Efficacy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Review of Meta-analyses”, Cognitive Therapy and Research (2012), abstract via Europe PMC.
Checked September 2026. The Stoic and Nietzsche passages rest on the free online translations above: Long, Higginson, Gummere, Basore, Common, Ludovici and Zimmern. The dates and background rest on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; the Ellis and Beck lines on Cavanna and colleagues; and the research on CBT on Hofmann and colleagues. If you can show any of these wrong, with a source, we want to see it: hacksvitae@gmail.com.
Related: Stoicism, plainly explained · Stoicism vs mindfulness · Did They Really Say That?
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