Christmas Every Day

I do not think that an old fellow like me need have been sitting here
to try and prevent your entertaining abject notions of yourselves, and
talking of yourselves in an abject and ignoble way: but to prevent there
being by chance among you any such young men as, after recognising their
kindred to the Gods, and their bondage in these chains of the body and
its manifold necessities, should desire to cast them off as burdens
too grievous to be borne, and depart their true kindred. This is the
struggle in which your Master and Teacher, were he worthy of the name,
should be engaged. You would come to me and say: "Epictetus, we can no
longer endure being chained to this wretched body, giving food and
drink and rest and purification: aye, and for its sake forced to be
subservient to this man and that. Are these not things indifferent and
nothing to us? Is it not true that death is no evil? Are we not in
a manner kinsmen of the Gods, and have we not come from them? Let us
depart thither, whence we came: let us be freed from these chains that
confine and press us down. Here are thieves and robbers and tribunals:
and they that are called tyrants, who deem that they have after a
fashion power over us, because of the miserable body and what appertains
to it. Let us show them that they have power over none."

And to this I reply:--

"Friends, wait for God. When He gives the signal, and releases you from
this service, then depart to Him. But for the present, endure to dwell
in the place wherein He hath assigned you your post. Short indeed is the
time of your habitation therein, and easy to those that are minded. What
tyrant, what robber, what tribunals have any terrors for those who thus
esteem the body and all that belong to it as of no account? Stay; depart
not rashly hence!"

- Epictetus

Cicero declared that if the number of his days were doubled, he should still not have time to read the lyric poets … What am I to do? Death is on my trail, and life is fleeting away; teach me something with which to face these troubles. Bring it to pass that I shall cease trying to escape from death, and that life may cease to escape from me.

Give me courage to meet hardships; make me calm in the face of the unavoidable.

Relax the straitened limits of the time which is allotted me. Show me that the good in life does not depend upon life’s length, but upon the use we make of it; also, that it is possible, or rather usual, for a man who has lived long to have lived too little.

– Seneca

The other day I had an iron lamp placed beside my household gods. I
heard a noise at the door and on hastening down found my lamp carried
off. I reflected that the culprit was in no very strange case.
"Tomorrow, my friend," I said, "you will find an earthenware lamp; for a
man can only lose what he has."

The reason why I lost my lamp was that the thief was superior to me in
vigilance. He paid however this price for the lamp, that in exchange
for it he consented to become a thief: in exchange for it, to become
faithless.

- Epictetus

But I have one whom I must please, to whom I must be subject, whom I
must obey:--God, and those who come next to Him. He hath entrusted me
with myself: He hath made my will subject to myself alone and given me
rules for the right use thereof. 
- Epictetus

“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.” – Marcus Aurelius

“I begin to speak only when I’m certain what I’ll say isn’t better left unsaid.”

– Cato

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”

– Epictetus

“We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.”

– Marcus Aurelius

Let’s spend the rest of July reading from the wisdom of the Stoic philosophers. Here’s one of my favourites from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

“At daybreak, when loth to rise, have this thought ready in thy mind: ‘I am rising for a man’s work.’ Am I then still peevish that I am going to do that for which I was born and for the sake of which I came into the world? Or was I made for this, that I should nuzzle under the bed-clothes and keep myself warm? ‘But this is pleasanter!’ Hast thou been made then for pleasure?”