All The Rest Is Commentary

“It’s a famous story, one we’ve told before. Hillel was asked to explain the Torah. ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ he said. ‘All the rest is commentary.’”Ryan discusses why the fundamental concepts of philosophy are all that matter, and why you should embody them, 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.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  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, dailystoic.com.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  All the rest is commentary. It's a famous story, one we've told before. Hillel was asked to explain the Torah. "Love thy neighbor as thyself," he said. All the rest is commentary. How would Marcus Aurelius, or Seneca, or Epictetus have answered a similar question? If you had asked Zeno, or Cleanthes, or Musonius Rufus, or any of the other great Stoics to explain Stoicism in a few words, or while standing on one leg, what would they have said? They probably would have just hit you with four words: courage, temperance, justice, wisdom. Or maybe they would have given you a sentence that implied those four words: "It's not what happens to you in life, it's how you respond," meaning that every situation

• 1:08Speaker 00

  calls for us to respond with courage, justice, wisdom, or temperance. Or they'd have drawn on Marcus and Epictetus's summation of philosophy: "Don't talk about being good, be good." Everything else, the hundreds of books that the Stoics wrote, from the birth of Zeno to the death of Marcus Aurelius, is commentary. Even this email is commentary, because what really matters are those precepts, those basic commands for living: "Love thy neighbor as thyself," courage, temperance, justice, wisdom. "Don't talk about philosophy, embody it." That's what matters. And of course, if you want a reminder of these four virtues, you can check out our Four Virtues coin in the Daily Stoic Stoic: courage, justice,

• 1:52Speaker 00

  wisdom, temperance. I carry that in my pocket every day. It reminds me of what I'm trying to live up to. It reminds me of that impossible, yet very reachable standard. So check that out, [email protected].