September 30th Reading from The Daily Stoic - You Can't Touch Me

"If you lay violent hands on me, you'll have my body, but my mind will remain with Stilpo."

~ Zeno, quoted in Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 7.1.24

September 29th Reading from The Daily Stoic - Your Actual Needs Are Small

"Nothing can satisfy greed, but even a small measure satisfies nature. So it is that the poverty of an exile brings no misfortune, for no place of exile is so barren as not to produce ample support for a person."

~ Seneca, On Consolation to Helvia, 10.1b

September 28th Reading from The Daily Stoic - You Hold The Trump Card

"How appropriate that the gods put under our control only the most powerful ability that governs all the rest - the ability to make the right use of external appearances - and that they didn't put anything else under our control. Was this simply because they weren't willing to give us more? I think if it had been possible they would have given us more, but it was impossible."

~ Epictetus, Discourses, 1.1.7-8

September 27th Reading from The Daily Stoic - What Will Prosperity Reveal?

"For even peace itself will supply more reason for worry. Not even safe circumstances will bring you confidence once your mind has been shocked - once it gets in the habit of blind panic, it can't provide for its own safety. For it doesn't really avoid danger, it just runs away. Yet we are exposed to greater danger with our backs turned."

~ Seneca, Moral Letters, 104.10b

September 26th Reading from The Daily Stoic - What Time Off Is For

"Leisure without study is death - a tomb for a living person."

~ Seneca, Moral Letters, 82.4

September 25th Reading from The Daily Stoic - The Vulnerability of Dependence

"Show me someone who isn't a slave! One is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to power, and all are slaves to fear. I could name former Consul who is a slave to a little old woman, a millionaire who is the slave of the cleaning woman . . . No servitude is more abject than the self-imposed."

~ Seneca, Moral Letters, 47.17

September 24th Reading from The Daily Stoic - It Could Happen To You

"Being unexpected adds to the weight of a disaster, and being a surprise has never failed to increase a person's pain. For that reason, nothing should ever be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent out in advance to all things and we shouldn't just consider the normal course of things, but what could actually happen. For is there anything in life that Fortune won't knock off its high horse if it pleases her?"

~ Seneca, Moral Letters, 91.3a-4