The Stoic Magazine Library

When you don’t value external things, other people’s opinions and their behaviour become irrelevant to you. So, you cannot be upset by them or be in conflict with them.

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.

Stoic quotes for every day of the month