You Must Learn to See | The Stoic Lesson of Marcus Aurelius' Crumbling Statue

We must change our aperture and perspective so that amidst the muddle and puddles of life, we can see what the artist and the philosopher sees. Reading Marcus Aurelius can change your life, but only if you know how to read his work 👉 Head here now to grab your Meditations book and guide bundle | https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/meditations-month-2026🎥 VIDEO EPISODE | Watch this episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6Rguu7AcsM✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues: courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  You must learn to see. It can be an ugly world. It can be a boring world. It can be a world of distraction, which is why the artist and the philosopher must learn how to cultivate their eyes. In 1940, the writer James Baldwin was walking in New York City with the painter Buford Delaney, his friend and mentor. As they crossed the street, Buford stopped the young Baldwin. "Look," he said, as he pointed down into the gutter. "What do you see?" All Baldwin saw was a puddle. Delaney told him to look again, and then he saw, as Nicholas Boggs recounts in Baldwin: A Love Story,

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  "a reflection of buildings moving like mercury in the gutter's black water, distorted and radiant." It's clear in meditations that someone did this for Marcus Aurelius. How else can you explain his beautiful observations of seemingly ordinary or even unpleasant things? From the way an olive rots on the ground or the foam flecks on a boar's mouth? What else could explain not just his turns of phrase, but his ability to find philosophical truths in his own struggles as a human being? Perhaps it was Rusticus, his philosophy teacher, who taught him this, or Fronto, his rhetoric teacher, or some poet or writer he met. But in any case, as Baldwin said of Delaney,

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  "The reality of his seeing caused me to begin to see." And so it goes for us. We must cultivate this ability to see beauty and poetry everywhere, because it is everywhere. We must look into the gutter. We must change our aperture and perspective so that amidst the muddle and puddles of life, we can see what the artist and the philosopher sees. And in fact, Marcus Aurelius is someone who helped me see. And my reading and rereading of this book has changed my life, and it's changed the lives of millions of people over the last 20 centuries. And it's also why we have Meditations Month here in April.

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  Daily Stoic, we've been putting together what I think is the perfect companion for reading and understanding Marcus Aurelius's meditations, Daily Stoic Meditations Guide. Like a book club or an annotated version of your favorite book, it's designed to be your personal roadmap through the nuances, subtleties, and complexities of Marcus Aurelius' and Meditations. It's not Spark Notes or a summary. There's no substitute for reading Meditations. It's not a shortcut, but it's a guide that will help enhance your understanding, help you really get everything you should get out of it, and hopefully guide you not just to read it once, but time after time after time. I'm really excited for you to check it out. Go to dailystoic.com/meditations, click it in the show notes. And also, I would

• 3:06Ryan Holiday?

  say, if you haven't read Meditations, do grab our edition. We sell it in the Daily Stoic store, the Gregory Hayes edition. It's leather, so it'll hold the test of time. And I'll link to that in today's show notes as well.

• 3:29Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, so there's a story about how they're restoring the famous Marcus Aurelius column in Rome. If you don't know about the column, it's a masterpiece of sculpture and carving depicting the 14 years that Marcus Aurelius spends at war with the Marko Mani tribes. And they put up this 94-foot column in his honor that still stands to this day. There's actually a Stoic lesson in this, because yes, 19 centuries later, a monument to his accomplishments still stands. And even though it's a little worn down and needs some restoration, you might say that this disprues Marcus's reminders and meditations that posthumous fame doesn't last and no one will remember him. But I actually think the fact that it's still there is precisely the point, because if you look at the top of this column, there's

• 4:14Ryan Holiday?

  not a statue of Marcus Aurelius on top. It's actually St. Paul. In the 16th century, Pope Sixtus V decides to take the monument to Marcus Aurelius and reuse it for his own purposes. And in the end, that's what Marcus Aurelius's greatest accomplishment becomes, a pedestal for Somebody else. And that is what Marcus is saying. That's what history does to all of us, even those of us famous enough to be remembered for one year, or one century, or 1,000 years. It, history takes us and it remixes and reuses us. It perverts us and undermines our legacy. It contradicts us. It absorbs us and it uses us for our own purposes. On a

• 4:59Ryan Holiday?

  long enough timeline, everyone's will and legacy is ignored. Their graves are lost and obscured. Their memory is written over. And we should remember this before it's too late. And let's say it didn't happen. Let's say it was still shining and gleaming. Why would that matter? He says in Meditations, "People who are excited by posthumous fame, forget that the people who remember them will die soon too, and that those after them in turn, until their memory pass from one to another, like a candle flame, gutters and goes out." And then he says, suppose that that actually wasn't true. Perhaps you are remembered forever. He says, "What good would that do you?" And he says, "I don't just mean when you're dead, but in your own lifetime.

• 5:40Ryan Holiday?

  What use is praise except to make your lifestyle a little more comfortable?" He's trying to remind himself that reputation, fame, impressing people, that doesn't matter. Who you are as a person, that's the only thing that counts. Who you are as a person to the people around you. Did you do good with the resources that you had? It's like the Shelley poem about Ozzy Mandius, right? The statue fallen over in the desert, two legs, the, the head there laying in the sand. A colossal wreck, he says, boundless and bare. Even though this person was so powerful and important in life, very little of it remains. Now, this is not the state of Marcus Aurelius's monument. You can go see it. It's still standing there. I've seen it myself. And yet, the same

• 6:25Ryan Holiday?

  Stoic lesson is actually there if you look for it. Okay. So if, if he's saying that being remembered is not important, that posthumous fame is worthless, what is he saying that does matter? Well, he does address this in Meditations too. He says, "Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone." And remember it. Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small, small as the corner of earth in which we live it. Small as even the greatest renown passed from mouth to mouth by short-lived stick figures, ignorant alike of themselves and those long dead. He's saying that all you have is this moment. All you have is who you are in this moment.

• 7:10Ryan Holiday?

  Creating some enormous legacy that other people get to live in. Focusing on impressing people who you will never meet. What good will that do you? He's saying what matters is that you do good now, that you live a good life, that you live a good life as a good person. That's what Marcus Aurelius is striving to do in Meditations. And the irony is, in not caring about posthumous fame, in not caring about his accomplishments lasting, in just trying to be a good man, to concentrate on what he has to do, as he writes in Meditations, to fix his eyes on it, reminding himself that his task is just to be a good human being and to do it, he says, without hesitation, to speak the truth as he sees it, with kindness and with humility and without hypocrisy.

• 7:53Ryan Holiday?

  In that, ironically, he does create a real legacy and we are still talking about him today.