Daily Stoic

"There was also a kindness and a compassion... You're not a bad person. You're doing your best. You're getting it right way more often than you're getting it wrong."

"I think it's important that it's not just reading it once again. It's the idea of rereading it every year. I know that I've taken something new out of it each time I've picked up this book, as I have now for almost 15 years."

"In Marcus Aurelius's pickup talk that he writes in Meditations, the opening passage of book five, he says, 'You don't love yourself enough or you would go and do what your nature demands.'"

"I think what's interesting about stoicism is even though you know Seneca and Jesus are born in the same year and there is obviously the Stoics believed in the gods they're very rarely saying like do this don't do that because God doesn't want you to or because you'll end up in heaven or hell."

"That's my favorite story about Marcus Reis. He's seen leaving the palace as an old man."

"The Odyssey is a story about perseverance. That to me is the primary message of the Odyssey because life isn't about one obstacle. Life is about obstacle after obstacle after obstacle."

"At Amazon, they say that it's always day one, right? You're always starting fresh."

"This is premeditatio mealum says the unexpected blow lands heaviest. If you're just naively going through the world expecting everything to be wonderful, never considering that this might happen or that might happen, you're going to be caught off guard."

"There's a great essay that Seneca writes called On Anger. And he's talking about how the leader, the emperor, is the person who can least afford to make decisions while angry."

"In meditations, Marcus really says you assemble your life action by action, step by step."