Greatness Should Be Put Up For Display

"Go stand in front of the Jefferson Monument in D. C. on an early morning, watch the sun rise through the columns and shining on those words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…” and try not to feel anything. Go stand in front of the Marcus Aurelius statue in Rome (or the replica at Brown University) and not feel as if you are a little bit closer to the man, and the incredible legacy of courage, moderation, justice, and wisdom for which he had lived."Ryan explains the importance of who we choose to revere 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/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.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good 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. Greatness should be put up for display. For more than four decades, Thomas Jefferson designed and redesigned, built and rebuilt, imagined and reimagined his Monticello Estate. The founding father who drafted the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson also drafted the blueprints for his house without any formal training, relying on his extensive

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  reading on architecture, particularly from ancient Rome and the Italian Renaissance. In 1789, shortly after returning from a few years' stay in France, where one Paris home particularly inspired him, he renovated Monticello to add an entrance hall that doubled as a museum, showcasing artifacts representing his interests and inspirations. It was the only space in Monticello that guests were guaranteed to see, and the 30 gold-trimmed Windsor chairs in the Monticello entrance hall suggest that Jefferson hoped visitors would linger with the great minds that were so influential in shaping his own. Because along with the artwork, maps, animal hides and heads, Jefferson exhibited his collection

• 1:33Ryan Holiday?

  of statues. The two most prominent in the room were busts of Voltaire and Turgot, the two French thinkers who guided his ideas about subjects like freedom, religion, law, economics, and government. It was in Europe that Jefferson once wrote, "The truth of Voltaire's observation offers itself perpetually, that every man here must be either a hammer or the anvil. I have endeavored to examine more nearly the condition of the great, that degree of happiness which is enjoyed in America by every class of people." Jefferson's library included all of Voltaire's works, so why purchase the bust?

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  Well, because he understood the power of statues. They aren't just works of art. They are blocks of stone to remind us that someone lived and died. That's a tombstone. Statues are guides. They represent a person who lived a life worthy of emulation. They inspire, they inform, they encourage, they stand for who we want to be. You don't agree? Go stand in front of the Jefferson Monument in DC on an early morning. Watch the sunrise through the columns and shining on those words. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Try not to feel anything.

• 2:54Ryan Holiday?

  Go stand in front of the Marcus Aurelius statue in Rome or the replica at Brown University and try not to feel you are a little bit closer to the man and the incredible legacy of courage, moderation, justice, and wisdom for which he lived. We should always be seeking out moments of this kind of association, reflection, and inspiration. When we see greatness, we should memorialize it. We should put it up on display, on our desk, on the wall, in ink on our skin, on the home screen of our phones. However you decide to honor the people whose example you love, put it somewhere you are guaranteed to see it every day, just as Jefferson did, and ask yourself, "Am I living by the example they stand for?"

• 3:35Ryan Holiday?

  And as I read that to you, I am looking at a bust of Marcus Aurelius I have on my desk, a bust of Seneca I have on my bookshelf, as well as a bust of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, that I have across the room. It's these statues that have inspired me as I've written my books, that I try to look at and touch at least once throughout the day. We actually ended up adapting a version of them for Daily Stoic. If you want to check out our statue of Marcus Aurelius, it's our bust of Marcus, our bust of Seneca, you can check both those out in the Daily Stoic store. They're not cheap, but they are handcrafted by this great statue maker and sculptor here in the United States named E.S. Schubert. They are inspired actually by the statue that I have. You can check that out. Go to store.dailystoic.com.