The Stoic Magazine Library

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.

Shame oſten encourages concealment. A person may fear that admitting a wrong choice means admitting that they are entirely bad or undeserving of care.

When shame arises from imagining how we must look through someone else’s eyes, we’re actually worrying about something firmly outside the boundaries of our own control.

We cannot change the action that produced the shame. That moment is gone. But we can decide what we do with it.

Stoicism shows failure or mistakes are not a verdict on our worth, but only an open invitation to examine our impressions.

Our need for approval may reveal a hidden shame about what we are doing. But not everything that attacts criticism reflects a defect in our character. When a matter has no bearing on our moral worth, we should follow our own reasoned judgment rather than the opinions of others.

While embarrassment is acute and temporary, shame is chronic and it lasts if you don’t treat it.

Since shame is oſten forward-looking as fear, and likely concerns how the person feeling it will be perceived by others, one might advocate not worrrng about reputation as something not in our control