8. “The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.” ― Marcus Aurelius

Technically, Heraclitus, who lived around 500 BC, wasn’t a Stoic, but his ideas greatly influenced all subsequent philosophers. Zeno, born 334 BC, is considered the founder of Stoicism, and Marcus Aurelius can be deemed the last great Stoic before the decline of the Roman Empire. Here are some of...

7. “True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and wi...

2. “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” ― Marcus Aurelius

A few caveats: Epicurus founded his own school of thought, Epicureanism, and though it is often depicted as a philosophy contrary to Stoicism, the two approaches actually have a lot in common. Hence, some of his Stoic-leaning ideas are worth including. Each quote has received over 1,000 likes on ...

It is only in the second half of the 20th century that Stoicism found renewed interest, thanks in part to a book by an academic, Problems in Stoicism . The second party to be credited is

2. “We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we speak.” — Zeno of Citium

The first time I ever heard about Stoicism was when my parents used a German expression called “stoische Ruhe” — Stoic calm. The phrase usually describes someone who seems to be unfazed in the face of adversity. “With Stoic calm, he accepted hi...

10. “People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.” — Seneca

6. “I begin to speak only when I’m certain what I’ll say isn’t better left unsaid.” — Cato the Younger

2. “Let the mind be disciplined to understand and to endure its own lot; let it have the knowledge that there is nothing which fortune does not dare — that she has the same jurisdiction over empires as over emperors, the same power over cities as over the citizens who dwell therein. We ...

3. “Receive without pride, let go without attachment.” — Marcus Aurelius

10. “You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” — Marcus Aurelius

6. “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” ― Marcus Aurelius

7. “Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won’t make us happier.” ― Randy Pausch

9. “A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.” — Nassim Taleb

2. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” — Reinhold Niebuhr

13. “You shouldn’t give circumstances the power to rouse anger, for they don’t care at all.” — Marcus Aurelius

9. “Men are disturbed not by things but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.” — Epictetus

9. “Freedom isn’t secured by filling up on your heart’s desire but by removing your desire.” — Epictetus

6. “Choose not to be harmed, and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed, and you haven’t been.” — Marcus Aurelius

8. “Nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all problems, and we should consider not what is wont to happen, but what can happen.” — Seneca

7. “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity,...

10. “If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, ‘He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.’” ― Epictetus

12. “So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long. For suppose you should think that a man had had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as he left harbor, and carried hither and thither and dri...

3. “People will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.” ― Timothy Ferriss

Okay, so much for the most important quotes from Stoics, but what about the most popular ones? Which ones resonate the most with people? On Goodreads , over 125 million members can vote on their favori...

5. “Let your desires be ruled by reason .” — Cicero

8. “If you accomplish something good with hard work, the labor passes quickly, but the good endures; if you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures.” — Musonius Rufus

3. “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” ― Epicurus

3. “Fate guides the willing, but drags the unwilling.” — Cleanthes

4. “There could be no justice, unless there were also injustice; no courage, unless there were cowardice; no truth, unless there were falsehood.” — Chrysippus

4. “As a Stoic, I must despise injury, or, rather, I must not feel it, must not be affected by it so that it cannot violate the freedom of my soul…” ― Alexandra David-Néel

11. “Wherever a person can live, there one can also live well.” — Marcus Aurelius

5. “Given that all must die, it is better to die with distinction than to live long.” — Musonius Rufus

I’m not an expert in Stoic philosophy, but I’ve been studying and enjoying Stoic wisdom for almost a decade. I read The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday several years in a row. Other books I’ve read, at least in parts, includ...

10. “Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.” — Jerzy Gregorek

If you want to grasp the most important Stoic ideas — self-reflection, restraint, taking action, and acceptance — in a nutshell, you could do worse than start with these lines from 10 quintessential Stoics. We’ve sorted them chronologically based on when their originators lived.

1. “You could not step twice into the same river.” — Heraclitus

9. “Men are disturbed not by things but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.” — Epictetus

4. “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.” — Seneca

14. “It would be tedious to recount all the ways by which fate may come; but this one thing I know: all the works of mortal man have been doomed to mortality, and in the midst of things which have been destined to die, we live!” — Seneca

7. “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” — Seneca

1. “Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” ― Marcus Aurelius

6. “Having to fight for the thing you want doesn’t mean you deserve it any less.” ― Anna Kendrick

8. “We love being mentally strong, but we hate situations that allow us to put our mental strength to good use.” ― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Around 600 years after its inception, Stoicism got lost in the sands of time. For nearly 2,000 years, the philosophy and its scarce literary remnants were condemned to obscurity. Sitting in church archives and private collections, Stoic ideas were shunned in public by Christians and other religio...

5. “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.” ― Marcus Aurelius

1. “We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it. Life is long if you know how to use it.” — Seneca

1. “Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of—that’s the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.” ―...