Stoicism links
In September of 1942, a young psychiatrist found himself standing in line just outside of a Nazi concentration camp. At the time, nobody knew the extent of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime.
Belisarius is one of the greatest yet unknown military generals in all of history. His name has been so obscured and forgotten by history that he makes the under appreciated General George Marshall seem positively famous. At least they named the Marshall Plan after George.
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus was born a slave, around 55 A.D., in the Greco-Roman spa town of Hierapolis—present-day Pamukkale, Turkey. I first encountered his teachings in 2011, shortly after moving from San Francisco to Istanbul. I lived alone on a university campus in a forest.
Principles of Adult Behavior Be patient. No matter what. Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn’t say to him. Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you. Expand your sense of the possible.
Summum Bonum was the expression from Cicero, Rome’s greatest orator. In Latin, it means “the highest good.” And what is the highest good? What is it that we are supposed to be aiming for in this life? To the Stoics, the answer is virtue.
How does one live well? It’s a question that our fellow human beings have been pondering for centuries. Out of that simple question, many philosophies and religions have been born. But no philosophy does a better job of explaining the ideas for living well in a practical way than Stoicism.
Meditations (Medieval Greek: Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν, romanized: Ta eis he'auton, lit. 'things to one's self') is a series of personal writings by Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor from AD 161 to 180, recording his private notes to himself and ideas on Stoic philosophy.
How often have you finished a book and tucked it away on your bookshelf? Or how often have you borrowed a book, read it, and returned it? There’s a difference between reading and living a book. Most of us simply read books.
People get angry for all sorts of reasons, from the trivial ones (someone cut me off on the highway) to the really serious ones (people keep dying in Syria and nobody is doing anything about it). But, mostly, anger arises for trivial reasons.