Stoic Meditations

Do not grow weary, perform your duty, and act as becomes a good person. Help one with money, another with credit, another with your favor; this one with good advice, that one with sound maxims.

The book-keeping of benefits is simple: it is all expenditure; if any one returns it, that is clear gain; if he does not return it, it is not lost, I gave it for the sake of giving.

It is the property of a great and good mind to covet, not the fruit of good deeds, but good deeds themselves.

Let us bestow benefits, not put them out at interest.

Among the numerous faults of those who pass their lives recklessly and without due reflexion, I should say that there is hardly any one so hurtful to society as this, that we neither know how to bestow or how to receive a benefit.

Marcus Atilius Regulus in his second consulship was taken prisoner in Africa by the stratagem of Xanthippus, a Spartan general serving under the command of Hannibal’s father Hamilcar. …

Pray, tell me, does it coincide with the character of your good person to lie for their own profit, to slander, to overreach, to deceive? Nay, verily; anything but that!

“When a man enters the foot-race,” says Chrysippus with his usual aptness, “it is his duty to put forth all his strength and strive with all his might to win; but he ought never with his foot to trip, or with his hand to foul a competitor.”

Cicero presents the Stoic argument that we are born to be virtuous, meaning prosocial. The Epicureans thought we are born to seek pleasure and avoid pain. They both had a point.

Cicero explains that ethical reasoning is akin to mathematics: it begins with certain axioms that are taken for granted. Which axioms does your ethical thinking assume to be true?