Reference
Stoic Quotes
A short, growing collection of Stoic quotations, each checked against a public-domain translation of the original text before it went on this page. Quote sites circulate a lot of mangled, paraphrased, and outright invented lines attributed to Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus. Where the wording you've probably seen elsewhere differs from what the source actually says, this page tells you.
Seneca
Primary source
He suffers more than is necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.
Seneca is writing to a friend dreading a loss that hasn't happened yet. Anticipating pain in advance doesn't soften it when it arrives, it just adds a second round of suffering beforehand.
Wording note: Often quoted with the clauses reversed, as "A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary." Same idea, not Gummere's actual sentence order.
Related: Premeditation of Adversity
Primary source
When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind.
From a letter on living toward a fixed purpose. Without a clear aim, every circumstance looks equally like progress or drift, because there's nothing to measure it against.
Wording note: Widely circulated in a looser modern paraphrase, "If you don't know which port you are sailing to, no wind is favorable." That phrasing is closer to a literal rendering of Seneca's Latin than to Gummere's own English.
Primary source
Why need we weep over parts of our life? the whole of it calls for tears.
From a consolation letter written to a mother grieving her son. Seneca isn't minimizing the loss, he's pointing at something larger: if death is what makes you weep, mortality itself gives you reason enough, everywhere, all the time.
Wording note: Commonly attributed to the Letters to Lucilius. It isn't from the Letters: it's from a separate work, the consolation essay To Marcia (De Consolatione ad Marciam), which doesn't yet have its own page on this site.
Primary source
You fear everything, like mortals as you are, and yet you desire everything as if you were immortals.
Seneca's diagnosis of wasted time: fear keeps people cautious, as anyone who knows they'll die should be, but desire keeps them grasping, as if they had unlimited time left. Both attitudes ignore how short life actually is.
Wording note: Often quoted restructured as "You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire." Same idea; Aubrey Stewart's public-domain translation above is the one actually in print.
Related: Desire
Primary source
We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
Seneca is telling a younger friend not to borrow trouble: most of what people dread never happens, and rehearsing hypothetical disasters does real damage even when reality turns out fine.
Wording note: Usually seen without Gummere's "often": "We suffer more in imagination than in reality." A small difference, kept here for exactness.
Primary source
Everywhere means nowhere.
Seneca is warning against constant novelty, in travel, in reading, in company, as a substitute for actually settling into one place or one line of thought long enough for it to change you.
Wording note: Often restated as "To be everywhere is to be nowhere," a near-identical rendering of Gummere's line above.
Epictetus
Primary source
Of things some are in our power, and others are not.
The opening line of Epictetus's handbook, and the seed of the entire Dichotomy of Control: nearly everything else in Stoic ethics builds on this one distinction.
Related: Dichotomy of Control
Primary source
It is impossible for a man to begin to learn that which he thinks that he knows.
Epictetus opens this chapter by naming self-conceit as the first thing philosophy has to remove: you cannot examine a judgment you have never questioned.
Wording note: Often quoted with "begin to" dropped, as "It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows." The missing clause is small but changes the claim slightly.
Related: Impressions & Assent
Primary source
If you would improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to externals.
The qualifier at the end is the whole point: Epictetus isn't recommending indifference to everything, only to other people's opinions about the things that were never yours to control in the first place.
Wording note: Commonly quoted with the qualifier removed, as "If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." Dropping "with regard to externals" changes what the line is actually claiming.
Related: Preferred Indifferents
Primary source
The man did not know the rest of my faults, for he would not have mentioned these only.
Epictetus's advice for being criticized: don't rush to defend yourself, and don't take an insult as a full account of your character. If anything, the critic missed a lot.
Wording note: Often paraphrased as "He was ignorant of my other faults; else he would not have mentioned these alone." A light rewording of Long's clause, not a different translation.
Related: Someone Insulted Me
Marcus Aurelius
Primary source
He often acts unjustly who does not do a certain thing; not only he who does a certain thing.
A short, easy-to-miss line: Marcus is reminding himself that failing to act, when action was owed, is its own kind of injustice, not a neutral non-event.
Wording note: The version that circulates most widely online, "You can also commit injustice by doing nothing," is Gregory Hays's 2002 translation, which is still under copyright. The wording above is the public-domain equivalent.
Related: Justice
Primary source
Contemplate continually all things coming to pass by change, and accustom yourself to think that Universal Nature loves nothing so much as to change what is and to create new things in their likeness.
One of several places in Meditations where Marcus works to make change itself feel unremarkable, less a series of losses to resist and more the ordinary behavior of the universe he is part of.
Wording note: Often lightly modernized online as "Constantly observe that all things take place by change, and accustom yourself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change the things that are." Same passage, paraphrased rather than quoted from Long's actual translation.
Related: Amor Fati
This list favors accuracy over size, so it's shorter than most "Stoic quotes" pages online. It grows only when a new quotation clears the same check every quote above already passed. For the ideas behind these lines, see Concepts; for the philosophers themselves, see Philosophers; for the full texts they're drawn from, see Texts.