Why stoicism matters

Stoicism is a way of living to achieve happiness, by understanding the world that is painful and by refusing desires that cause more pain and to unify our will to the Superior Will of God. If our lives are already painful, and no matter what we do we can see God’s plan in it, and no matter what we do it will never change, but we can be free to accept it or deny it. But we are responsible to make of life the most of it.

Through history there have been able to see stoicism in many great people around the world, demonstrating its power and utility to achieve happiness.

Prussian King, Frederick the Great, was said to ride with the works of the Stoics in his saddlebags because they could, in his words, “sustain you in misfortune.”

Montaigne, the politician and essayist, had a line from Epictetus carved into the beam above the study in which he spent most of his time.

George Washington was introduced to Stoicism by his neighbours at age seventeen, and afterwards, put on a play about Cato to inspire his men in that dark winter at Valley Forge.

Thomas Jefferson had a copy of Seneca on his nightstand when he died.

The economist Adam Smith’s theories on the interconnectedness of the world—capitalism—were significantly influenced by the Stoicism that he studied as a schoolboy, under a teacher who had translated Marcus Aurelius’ works.

The political thinker, John Stuart Mill, wrote of Marcus Aurelius and Stoicism in his famous treatise On Liberty, calling it “the highest ethical product of the ancient mind.”

Thomas Wentworth Higginson was an ardent abolitionist and Civil War hero who led the first black regiment in the Union army and was a mentor of Emily Dickinson. He also happened to be an early translator of Epictetus.

Eugène Delacroix, the renowned French Romantic artist (known best for his painting Liberty Leading the People) was an ardent Stoic, referring to it as his “consoling religion.”

Toussaint Louverture, himself a former slave who challenged an emperor by leading the Haitian revolution, read and was deeply influenced by the works of Epictetus.

Theodore Roosevelt, after his presidency, spent eight months exploring (and nearly dying in) the unknown jungles of the Amazon, and of the eight books he brought on the journey, two were Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and Epictetus’ Enchiridion. “We must all wear out or rust out, everyone of us. My choice is to wear out”.

Bill Clinton rereads Marcus Aurelius every single year

Wen Jiabao, the former prime minister of China, claims that Meditations is one of two books he travels with and has read it more than one hundred times over the course of his life.

James Mattis, the current Secretary of Defense, carried with him Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations while on deployment.

Great people nowadays have received many rewards by being stoic, what are you waiting for?