The Stoic Magazine Library

Stoic quotes for every day of the month

Life will always bring joy and sorrow, beginnings and endings, certainty and uncertainty. Our task is not to control which of those arrives. Our task is to meet each one, as best we can, with courage, kindness, and grace.

The finiteness of life is not a reason to despair. It is the reason this season—and this ordinary day within it—is worth noticing.

If you’re in one of those beautiful seasons where life feels exciting, productive, and full of momentum, don’t assume you no longer need to contemplate your mortality.

Death's repossession notice never tells us the day it will arrive. That’s why Seneca urges us to make each day "a rounded whole."

Virtue, as befits a human being, is moral perfection. In the language of the Stoics, then, moral perfection is the sole good, and this is what it means to live “in harmony with nature.”

We must prepare for death before we prepare for life. Our life is well enough provided for, but we are too greedy with regard to what we have.

When or whether suicide might make sense or not, be right or wrong, is not just an abstract doctrine, but also for some an existential matter, one to which the Stoics might contribute some useful clarity.