Daily Stoic Sundays: Five Life-Changing Quotes From Seneca

In today's Sunday Podcast, Ryan talks about five quotes from Seneca, one of the three founding fathers of Stoicism and a famous writer and advisor as well, and how they can change your life for the better.. This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. Four Sigmatic is a maker of mushroom coffee, lattes, elixirs, and more. Their drinks all taste amazing and they've full of all sorts of all-natural compounds and immunity boosters to help you think clearly and live well. Four Sigmatic has a new exclusive deal for Daily Stoic listeners: get up to 39% off their bestselling Lion’s Mane bundle by visiting foursigmatic.com/stoic.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, everyone. It's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoic. As you know, the launch of Lives of the Stoics is almost upon us. We just started putting up the preorder stuff. You can check that out at dailystoic.com/lives. Of all the lives, I think, that are the most complex, the most complicated, but also the most modern and relatable, Seneca has got to be it. It was fascinating to write about him, to talk about him. You know, my sort of dance with Seneca goes all the way back to my college dorm room when I first got letters of a Stoic. And, you know, this book just hits you. But then, the more you study the man, the greater the depth and the complexity

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  and, in some cases, the hypocrisy of the words hits you. And then, in other cases, the beauty and the profundity of the words hits you. You know, when Seneca is talking about mortality, the memento mori that threads through his work. I mean, this is a guy who, through most of his youth, thought he was gonna suffocate and die. He had some sort of lung condition. We're not totally sure what it was. This is a guy that was exiled. This is a guy who was sentenced to death by multiple emperors, right? And so, you know, Seneca just remains, to me, this Endlessly complicated and fascinating figure. His ambition is relatable. His sort of sense of Stoic purity is admirable.

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  And yet, the reality of his life is sort of somewhere in between those two things. And so today, what I wanted to do was explore some of the best quotes from Seneca, what they are, how they've hit me, what we can learn from them, how they apply in Seneca's own life, how they apply inside Stoic philosophy. And so, without further ado, let's get into five life-changing quotes from Seneca. And as always, we must remember that the purpose of these quotes are not just picking them apart and analyzing them. These are not how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. This is not parsing text for some deeper, you know, hidden meaning or symbolism.

• 3:04Ryan Holiday?

  This is, as Seneca himself says, "We look at the words so that they might translate into works." And again, that is the tricky thing about Seneca is that he didn't always do it. But I think he tried, and I think definitely at the end, he got closer than many people ever suspected he would. And so, here we go. Enjoy. "Would you really know what philosophy offers humanity?" Seneca once said. "Philosophy offers counsel." Born at the turn of the first millennium, a time of paranoia and violence and political turmoil, Seneca needed counsel, just as you need counsel. He read widely and eventually discovered a school of philosophy known as Stoicism,

• 3:48Ryan Holiday?

  founded in Greece only a few centuries before. There, in the works of the Stoics, Seneca found what he was looking for: guidance on how to live a good life. And soon, he began writing letters and essays to family members, friends, promising young talents, sharing the wisdom that changed his life. "Because nothing will ever please me," he said, "no matter how excellent or beneficial, if I must retain the knowledge of it myself. No good thing is pleasant to possess," he said, "without friends to share it." So here are five quotes from Seneca's writings. That will change your life, just like they did his. There are more things likely to frighten us, Seneca wrote, than there are to crush us. We suffer more in imagination than in reality.

• 4:33Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca's life was full of suffering. He was born with a chronic lung condition. He lived through the reigns of the first five emperors, each increasingly more deranged and violent than the previous. He was exiled and lost everything twice. And yet, for all this suffering, his advice was that the only thing we should be worried about is what we're worried about. We spend so much time imagining worrying in advance that we actually torture ourselves more than the thing we're worried about ever could. And that is, of course, if it actually happens at all. The most important thing to remember about pain and suffering, Seneca said, is that it is inevitable, it can't be avoided. But what we must avoid is the phantom premonitions of what may or may not happen.

• 5:16Ryan Holiday?

  Instead of suffering in imagination, focus on what's immediately in front of you. Stay in the present, stay in reality. Excellence withers without an adversary, Seneca said. As fire is the test of gold, so adversity is the test of strong men. We like to live comfortably, to minimize inconveniences, to not have to do what we don't like to do, to find what we enjoy where we enjoy it and never leave. But Seneca said that this is a kind of death trap. A person who has never been challenged, he said, who always gets their way, is a tragic figure. You have passed through life without an opponent, he said. No one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.

• 5:58Ryan Holiday?

  Which is why Seneca talked over and over again about the importance of adversity, of not only embracing the struggle life throws at you, but actively seeking out that difficulty so you can be stronger and better and more prepared. Every day, he said, we should look to challenge ourselves. We should make choices that push us rather than help us atrophy. And when we are going through something tough, we should be grateful for the chance that it is helping us realize our full potential. Associate with those who will make a better man of you, Seneca said. Welcome those whom you Yourself can improve. The process is mutual. For men learn as they teach. Jim Rohn's widely quoted line is that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  James Altucher advises young writers and entrepreneurs to find their scene, a group of peers who push them to be better. But Goethe's maxim is better. Tell me whom you consort with, and I will tell you who you are. And Seneca said, if there's one thing we should be especially careful of, it's who we surround ourselves with. I never bring back home the same character that I took with me, he said. There is no person who does not stamp their character upon us or taint us unconsciously. We have to consider who we allow in our lives. We can't be afraid of cutting ties with old environments or relationships when it's clear that they're no longer serving us well. We can't be afraid of reaching out to new people or to make an attempt to break into new and better social circles. The stakes are high.

• 7:26Ryan Holiday?

  As Seneca put it, just as some diseases jump over onto those we have touched, so the mind infects those closest to us with evils. Anger always outlasts hurt, Seneca said. Best to take the opposite course. Would anyone think it normal to return a kick to a mule or a bite to a dog? There are a lot of destructive beliefs out there, but one of the most dangerous is that anger is productive fuel. We hear about an athlete who is kicked around, or an entrepreneur who is doubted, or an artist who is rejected, and we assume that anger was the fuel that powered them to triumph. The fact is that anger is a fuel that ignites and demolishes everything in its vicinity, which is why Seneca called it the ugliest and most savage of all emotions, because

• 8:09Ryan Holiday?

  no plague has done more harm to humankind. Don't let anyone convince you otherwise. Nothing great was truly fueled by anger. If it was fueled by anger, it is by definition not truly great. I know greatness, Seneca said, to be something unshakable, solid to its core, just and firm from the bottom up, such that it can't exist in evil natures. Sure, terrible and turbulent and lethal things could exist, but they won't have greatness, the foundation of which is strength and goodness. Goodness. "This is our big mistake," Seneca said, "to think we look forward to death. Most of death is already gone. Whatever time has passed is owned by death."

• 8:51Ryan Holiday?

  Like many philosophers, death was a common theme in Seneca's writings. "Let us prepare our minds as if we've come to the very end of life," he said. "Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life's books each day. The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time." But Seneca's greatest contribution on the topic of life's final act is that it wasn't actually a final act. Death, Seneca realized, is not something that lay ahead of us in the uncertain future. He realized that we were dying every day. The time you have spent listening to this video, you have died just a few minutes. No day, no minute, no second, once dead, can be revived. "It's not that we have a short time to live," Seneca said, "but that we waste a lot of

• 9:36Ryan Holiday?

  it. There is therefore only one thing we should do," he said, "live immediately." So if you take anything from Seneca's writings, from his wisdom, from the philosophy that so offered you counsel, it is that go out and live now while you still can. Fortune is fickle. Do not wait. Take it now. Live while you can. If you like the podcast that we do here, and you want to get it via email every morning, you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.