Those Who Read Little, Know Little

“Was there a Stoic who didn’t love reading? It’d be hard to name one. The last thing Cato did before he died was read.”Ryan explains why reading is so important, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.***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 Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic See 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 Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

• 0:27Ryan Holiday?

  Those who read little, know little. Was there a Stoic who didn't love reading? It'd be hard to name one. The last thing Cato did before he died was read. It's incredible, really. Even as Caesar had destroyed the Republic, the civil war was lost, and his inevitable suicide just hours away, Cato took the time to read some Plato, twice. He was still learning, up until the very end. Experience is a key component of wisdom, of course, but there are very few truly wise people out there who do not read, who are not lovers of books. There's a Latin saying, "He who reads little knows little." It's true. To become wise, we have to open our minds to the vast accumulation of experiences that have come before us.

• 1:12Ryan Holiday?

  To not read widely, as General Manis has said, is to be functionally illiterate. Chrysippus loved the play Medea so much that he quoted from it so much that he joked one of his essays was "The Medea of Chrysippus." In fact, one can't pick up the works of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, even the sayings of Epictetus, without being struck at how intimately familiar these philosophers were with the great writing, fiction, essays, books, and histories of their time. It's an example, a tradition, really, that we have to continue to follow. Given how much wonderful writing has been published since the time of the ancient Stoics, 20 centuries of books, it is profoundly arrogant and wasteful not to take advantage of it. Marcus Aurelius would have killed

• 1:55Ryan Holiday?

  to have access to the psychological research at your fingertips. If Chrysippus worshipped Medea then, think about what he'd think about you, having not picked up Shakespeare, besides those few begrudging pages in high school. Cato spent his last few precious minutes reading about Socrates, and you can't bear to pull yourself away from your phone? We read to learn, we read to lead. If we don't read much, we don't know much. If we don't seek wisdom, we won't find it.

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  Hey everyone. As you know, reading books is a huge part of my life. They've helped me accomplish my goals and become a better person. Like me, you probably feel you're not getting all you can out of the books that you read. And maybe you feel like you're kind of reading the same books over and over again, that you're stuck in a rut, or that your reading habits could be elevated, taken to a new level. Well, we've come out with a new 13-day challenge to help you do just that. It's called Read to Lead. We've got 13 days of Stoic-inspired challenges to help you take your reading to the next level. Comes with exercises, a new reading list each day, and some really awesome bonus material. You can check it out at dailystoic.com/reading.