Stoic Sage

Work: Not to rouse pity, not to win sympathy or admiration. Only this: Activity. Stillness. As the logos of the state requires.

Meditations 9.12

Things are wrapped in such a veil of mystery that many good philosophers have found it impossible to make sense of them. Even the Stoics have trouble. Any assessment we make is subject to alteration—just as we are ourselves. Look closely at them—how impermanent they are, how meaningless. Things that a pervert can own, a whore, a thief. Then look at the way the people around you behave. Even the best of them are hard to put up with—not to mention putting up with yourself. In such deep darkness, such a sewer—in the flux of material, of time, of motion and things moved—I don’t know what there is to value or to work for. Quite the contrary. We need to comfort ourselves and wait for dissolution. And not get impatient in the meantime, but take refuge in these two things: - Nothing can happen to me that isn’t natural. - I can keep from doing anything that God and my own spirit don’t approve. No one can force me to.

Meditations 5.10

Wouldn’t you rather leave petty arguments about these subjects to do-nothings who sit in a corner and receive their little stipend, or get nothing and whine about it? Step forward and make use of what you’ve learned. [56] It isn’t more logic chopping that is needed – our Stoic texts are full of that. What we need now are people to apply their learning and bear witness to their learning in their actions. [57] Please, be the one to take on this character, I am tired in my teaching of invoking examples from the past, I want to be able to hold up an example from my own time.

Discourses 1.29.55

Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for philosophy, they alone really live; for they are not content to be good guardians of their own lifetime only. They annex every age to their own; all the years that have gone before them are an addition to their store. Unless we are most ungrateful, all those men, glorious fashioners of holy thoughts, were born for us; for us they have prepared a way of life. By other men's labours we are led to the sight of things most beautiful that have been wrested from darkness and brought into light; from no age are we shut out, we have access to all ages, and if it is our wish, by greatness of mind, to pass beyond the narrow limits of human weakness, there is a great stretch of time through which we may roam. We may argue with Socrates, we may doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, exceed it with the Cynics. Since Nature allows us to enter into fellowship with every age, why should we not turn from this paltry and fleeting span of time and surrender ourselves with all our soul to the past, which is boundless, which is eternal, which we share with our betters?

On the Shortness of Life 14.1

If we philosophers had applied ourselves to our job as seriously as those old men in Rome pursue their interests, we, too, might be getting somewhere. [2] I have a friend even older than I who is now in charge of the grain supply in Rome. When he passed through here on his return from exile, what things he said in disparagement of his former life, swearing when he returned that from then on he would devote himself exclusively to a life of peace and tranquillity. ‘How much time have I got left, after all?’

Discourses 1.10.1