The Stoic Magazine Library

“Almost everything – even if it is only incidental to something else – adds extra pleasure to someone who is sensitive and insightful about how the universe works.”

Socrates believed virtue couldn’t exist in half measures; would he have thought the same of joy?

I now know that my past actions and ways of thinking only brought struggle – to myself and to others. A life with joy is so much better.

From a strictly and literal Stoic perspective, that is a negative emotion, something bad for us to feel, not something to be encouraged or indulged in. But my experiences make me wonder whether there isn’t something also good to be gained when these emotions are felt in connection and conjunction with joy.

Remember: the present moment is all we have. Life is fleeting; moments slip away with every breath. Even when pondering the future, you are still forced into the present moment – you are simply trying to bring that very uncertain future right here and now, which cannot be done.

We may learn how to hold on to the adamant, indifferent attitude when it’s required, yet relax a bit in more pleasurable circumstances.

Stoic quotes for every day of the month

We can be physically fee, sitting in the comfort of our homes and be psychologically imprisoned or enslaved – imprisoned in lives filled with desires, vice, excess, negative emotions, dependent on material things, and other people’s opinions.

When I stopped trying to control everything around me and focused only on what was within my own influence, my life changed dramatically.

The power and allure of Stoic freedom is that it is completely independent of everything. The ancient sages claiming to be free in the midst of captivity or happy on the torture rack might have overdone the point a bit, yet the principle holds. Stoic freedom is free of restraint. Isn’t it the most genuine freedom of all?

Sometimes I allow a flicker of imagined grief to come. Just a tiny flame that catches the corner of a page of my mind. I blow it out before it erupts and swallows me. For, in truth, the sorrows need no seeking and neither do the joys.

I’m just unencumbered with the fear of death. This is one of the great gifts of Stoic freedom.

Every day provides us with ample opportunities to engage fully in life while also understanding how eudaimonia is truly achieved, and it all gets down to a single word: perspective.

Stoicism isn’t supernatural, it isn’t a religion, and what it asks you to think through is never anywhere near as strange as haunted houses, folkloric creatures, or higher planes of existence.