The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living: Featuring new translations of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius

Seneca reminds us that while we might be good at protecting our physical property, we are far too lax at enforcing our mental boundaries. Property can be regained; there is quite a bit of it out there—some of it still untouched by man. But time? Time is our most irreplaceable asset—

“Robbers, perverts, killers, and tyrants—gather for your inspection their so-called pleasures!” —MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 6.34

Edgar Mitchell, an astronaut, was one of the first people to see the earth from outer space. As he later recounted: “In outer space you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics l

“The more you say,” Robert Greene has written, “the more likely you are to say something foolish.”

“If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid.”

The Super Bowl–winning coach Bill Walsh used to avoid this risk by scripting the beginning of his games. “If you want to sleep at night before the game,” he said in a lecture on game planning, “have your first 25 plays established in your own mind the night before that. You can walk into the stadium and you can start the game without that stress fa

“If someone is slipping up, kindly correct them and point out what they missed. But if you can’t, blame yourself—or no one.” —MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 10.4

In other words, it is possible to hold no opinion about a negative thing. You just need to cultivate that power instead of wielding it accidentally.

next time you hear someone ramble on about how the market decides what things are worth. The market might be rational … but the people who comprise it are not.