The Stoic Magazine Library

Stoic quotes for every day of the month

Readers willing to give it that attention will find a steady and thoughtful exploration of moral wisdom drawn from two of the West’s most influential traditions.

Each morning offers another opportunity to choose restraint over reaction, integrity over convenience, and courage over ease. My gratitude is a daily commitment to live well, even imperfectly.

Harmony is oſten mistaken for balance or calm, but the Stoics understood it as alignment: a fitting relationship between my judgments, my actions, and the world as it actually is. I can choose restraint instead of reactivity, attention instead of avoidance.

There is another form of gratitude that oſten goes overlooked—one that matters even more when life is difficult. It is gratitude for capacity.

Gratitude is learning how to receive what arrives, without clinging to what passes or resenting what never came.

For Stoics, happiness comes from the practice of our virtues, which leads to “eudaimonia”— flourishing. And this begins in gratitude.

The world around us is ordered. ... the chaos we perceive is really a chaos within ourselves.

A giſt creates a bond; gratitude is simply the refusal to deny that bond through fear, resentment, or forgetfulness. To receive well is already an act of virtue.

Be ready with gratitude not just for past benefactors but also those we are engaged with in our present relationships, and to continue that disposition into the future.