# The Daily Stoic  ## Metadata - Author: Ryan Holiday - Full Title: The Daily Stoic - Category: #books - Summary: Control your perceptions, desires, and impulses to gain clarity, wisdom, and self-mastery. Focus on what you can control, act justly and deliberately, and review your days. Build your life action by action, accept obstacles, and adapt with resilience and purpose. ## Highlights - “Nature is merciful,” he later wrote in a newspaper article about the experience, “and does not try her children, man or beast, beyond their compass. It is only where the cruelty of man intervenes that hellish torments appear. For the rest—live dangerously; take things as they come; dread naught, all will be well.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5qrg9eysjh06sadbxny5kr0)) - Tags: #life-advice - Remember that to change your mind and to follow someone’s correction are consistent with a free will. For the action is yours alone—to fulfill its purpose in keeping with your impulse and judgment, and yes, with your intelligence. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5qrh9xvdncvhnqw5saw65j1)) - Tags: #life-advice - Conditions change. New facts come in. Circumstances arise. If you can’t adapt to them—if you simply proceed onward, unable to adjust according to this additional information—you are no better than a robot. The point is not to have an iron will, but an adaptable will—a will that makes full use of reason to clarify perception, impulse, and judgment to act effectively for the right purpose. It’s not weak to change and adapt. Flexibility is its own kind of strength. In fact, this flexibility combined with strength is what will make us resilient and unstoppable. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5qrhyxpxkns1k0j4b3n1teb)) - Tags: #life-advice - Life, like wrestling, requires more than graceful movement. We have to undergo hard training and cultivate an indomitable will to prevail. Philosophy is the steel against which we sharpen that will and strengthen that resolve. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5qrknxesvjxgzctcr687tsp)) - Tags: #life-advice - UPON THE FIELDS OF FRIENDLY STRIFE ARE SOWN THE SEEDS THAT, UPON OTHER FIELDS, ON OTHER DAYS WILL BEAR THE FRUITS OF VICTORY. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5s7tbgve132seyzz8ayc8q0)) - “I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks once,” he said, “but I fear the man who has practiced one kick ten thousand times.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5y739sx3aq4zcpy0sw5tgga)) - Our minds should be sent out in advance to all things and we shouldn’t just consider the normal course of things, but what could actually happen. For is there anything in life that Fortune won’t knock off its high horse if it pleases her? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5y7g9w11bq0fbxrqfz4rnfn)) - Just a year or so after writing this letter, he was falsely accused of plotting against Nero. The price? Seneca was sentenced to commit suicide. As the historian Tacitus relates the scene, Seneca’s closest friends wept and protested the verdict. “Where,” Seneca asked them repeatedly, “are your maxims of philosophy, or the preparations of so many years’ study against evils to come? Who knew not Nero’s cruelty?” That is: he knew it could happen to him too, and so he was prepared for it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5y7jjawxdt8ey29p0tkmema)) - We’re all addicts in one way or another. We’re addicted to our routines, to our coffee, to our comfort, to someone else’s approval. These dependencies mean we’re not in control of our own lives—the dependency is. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k63bvpj8c2edf6refh1g9q9q)) - “Anyone who truly wants to be free,” Epictetus said, “won’t desire something that is actually in someone else’s control, unless they want to be a slave.” The subjects of our affection can be removed from us at a moment’s notice. Our routines can be disrupted, the doctor can forbid us from drinking coffee, we can be thrust into uncomfortable situations. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k63bwb6sqkf22m3wy9s9arwb)) - “Leisure without study is death—a tomb for the living person.” —SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 82.4 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k63bxd7wvyf8e0xpebqxnr0y)) - Make sure you enjoy your relaxation like a poet—not idly but actively, observing the world around you, taking it all in, better understanding your place in the universe. Take a day off from work every now and then, but not a day off from learning. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k63c6arg41f5y7nyxg4h2y7f)) - the purpose of retirement is not to live a life of indolence or to run out the clock, as easy as that might be to do. Rather, it’s to allow for the pursuit of your real calling now that a big distraction is out of the way. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k63c6yxm5awf8te9de7pd49p))