Stoic Week 2017, Monday Evening Text For Reflection

Stoic Week 2017 - Evening Text For Reflection

"Never value as beneficial to yourself something which will force you one day to break your word,
abandon your sense of shame, hate, suspect, or curse someone else, pretend, or desire something
that needs the secrecy of walls or curtains. The one who has chosen to value above all his own
mind and guardian-spirit and the worship of his mind’s virtue does not make a drama of his life or
complain and will not need either isolation or crowds of people; most of all, he will live neither
pursuing nor avoiding things. He does not care in any way whether he will have his soul enclosed
by his body for a longer or shorter time; even if he needs to leave right away, he goes away as
readily as if he were performing any of the other actions that can be done in a decent and orderly
way, exercising care for this alone throughout his life, that his mind should never be in a state
which is alien to that of a rational and social being."

 ~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 3.7

Sunday Evening Text for Reflection for Stoic Week 2016

"I travel along nature’s way until I fall down and take my rest, breathing out my last into
the air, from which I draw my daily breath, and falling down to that earth from which
my father drew his seed, my mother her blood and my nurse her milk, and from which
for so many years I have taken my daily food and drink, the earth which carries my
footsteps and which I have used to the full in so many ways."

 – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.4

Saturday Evening Text for Reflection for Stoic Week 2016

"At every hour give your full concentration, as a Roman and a man, to carrying out the
task in hand with a scrupulous and unaffected dignity and affectionate concern for
others and freedom and justice, and give yourself space from other concerns. You will
give yourself this if you carry out each act as if it were the last of your life, freed from
all randomness and passionate deviation from the rule of reason and from pretense
and self-love and dissatisfaction with what has been allotted to you. You see how few
things you need to master to be able to live a smoothly flowing life: the gods will ask
no more from someone who maintains these principles."

 – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.5

Friday Evening Text for Reflection for Stoic Week 2016

I didn't get to post this last night because I was in the hospital (AGAIN!). Talk about a test of Stoic resilience! Anyway, here was last night's text for reflection:

"One type of person, whenever he does someone else a good turn, is quick in
calculating the favor done to him. Another is not so quick to do this; but in himself he
thinks about the other person as owing him something and is conscious of what he
has done. A third is in a sense not even conscious of what he has done, but is like a
vine which has produced grapes and looks for nothing more once it has produced its
own fruit, like a horse which has run a race, a dog which has followed the scent, or a
bee which has made its honey. A person who has done something good does not
make a big fuss about it, but goes on to the next action, as a vine goes on to produce
grapes again in season. So you should be one of those who do this without in a sense
being aware of doing so."

 – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.6

Thursday Evening Text for Reflection for Stoic Week 2016

"Every habit and faculty is formed or strengthened by the corresponding act – walking
makes you walk better, running makes you a better runner. If you want to be literate,
read, if you want to be a painter, paint. Go a month without reading, occupied with
something else, and you’ll see what the result is. And if you’re laid up a mere ten
days, when you get up and try to talk any distance, you’ll find your legs barely able to
support you. So if you like doing something, do it regularly; if you don’t like doing
something, make a habit of doing something different. The same goes for the affairs
of the mind… So if you don’t want to be hot-tempered, don’t feed your temper, or
multiply incidents of anger. Suppress the first impulse to be angry, then begin to count
the days on which you don’t get angry. ‘I used to be angry every day, then only every
other day, then every third…’ If you resist it a whole month, offer God a sacrifice,
because the vice begins to weaken from day one, until it is wiped out altogether. ‘I
didn’t lose my temper this day, or the next, and not for two, then three months in
succession.’ If you can say that, you are now in excellent health, believe me."

 – Epictetus, Discourses, 2.18

Wednesday Evening Text for Reflection for Stoic Week 2016

"Get rid of the judgement and you have got rid of the idea. ‘I have been harmed’; get
rid of the idea, ‘I have been harmed’, and you have got rid of the harm itself."

 – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.7

Tuesday Evening Text for Reflection for Stoic Week 2016

"Try to persuade them; and act even against their will, whenever the principle of justice
leads you to do so. But if someone uses force to resist you, change your approach to
accepting it and not being hurt, and use the setback to express another virtue.
Remember too that your motive was formed with reservation and that you were not
aiming at the impossible. At what then? A motive formed with reservation. But you
have achieved this; what we proposed to ourselves is actually happening."

 – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.50

Monday Evening Text for Reflection for Stoic Week 2016

Monday Evening Text for Reflection for Stoic Week 2016:

"Let us go to our sleep with joy and gladness; let us say ‘I have lived; the course which Fortune set for me is finished.’ And if God is pleased to add another day, we should welcome it with glad hearts. That man is happiest, and is secure in his own possession of himself, who can await the morrow without apprehension. When a man has said: ‘I have lived!’, every morning he arises he receives a bonus."

 – Seneca, Letters, 12.9