From both Seneca and Marcus we see a fairly remarkable admonition: Stop reading. Throw away your books, Marcus says to himself. Seneca tells Lucilius to stop chasing new titles and gorging himself on new books. For philosophers, this seems like strange advice. Isn’t the whole point of the pursuit of wisdom to read as much […]
Just two and a half years ago, General Michael Flynn stood on the stage at the Republican National Convention and led some 20,000 people (and a good many more at home) in an impromptu chant of “Lock Her Up! Lock Her Up!” about his enemy Hillary Clinton. A few months later, he was swept into […]
On December 25th, people all over the world celebrate Christmas, a holiday which marks the birth of Jesus Christ, one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived. This was a man who lived two thousand years ago, taught timeless lessons about kindness, mercy, forgiveness, on doing one’s duty, on the dangers of money and the […]
In 1880, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his brother, “My happiness is so great that it makes me almost afraid.” In October of that year, life was even better. As he wrote in his diary the night of his wedding, “Our intense happiness is too sacred to be written about.” He would consider it to be […]
We like to think that we’re so advanced. That things have changed so radically since the ancient days of tyrants and barbarism. But have they? Here’s a photo of Jamal Khashoggi’s son, whose father was brutally executed mere days before, being forced to shake the hand of the alleged mastermind of his father’s murder: Saudi Crown […]
So we’ve begun to get serious about our training, both physical and philosophical. Before, we never read, and now we do. Before, we were lazy and slothful, and now we’re regularly going to the gym. Before, we would eat everything we felt like eating—too much of it usually—and now we’ve got a diet and we’re […]
Stoicism has never had a “Bible”—that is, a book collecting all the most essential teachings of the philosophy in one place. I’ve tried to assemble a book in something like that style, at least with respect to the ethics of the philosophy—The Practicing Stoic. It takes each of the most important and practical Stoic ideas […]