Public Ponder

“The outcome of violent anger is a mental raving, and therefore anger is to be avoided not for the sake of moderation but for the sake of sanity.” Seneca the Younger, in Letters from a Stoic Anger, it...Read More →

Seneca, like all Stoics, was obsessed with death. His writings are full of reflections on death: how to approach it, how to regard it, and, above all, how to use the awareness of it to help us lead our...Read More →

“Happy the man who improves other people not merely when he is in their presence but even when he is in their thoughts! And happy, too, is the person who can so revere another as to adjust and shape his...Read More →

"It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the man who hankers for more." Seneca the Younger, in Letters from a Stoic This sentence from Letter II is one of Seneca's most often quoted ones....Read More →

Today marks day 20 of my 30-day challenge to write a piece on a different quote from Seneca’s “Letters from a Stoic” for 30 consecutive days.  I’ve been pondering a simple question today: Who’s getting...Read More →

“There is a world of difference between, on the one hand, choosing not to do what is wrong and, on the other, not knowing how to do it in the first place.” Seneca the Younger, in Letters from a Stoic ...Read More →

"To expect punishment is to suffer it; and to earn it is to expect it. Where there is a bad conscience, some circumstance or other may provide one with impunity, but never with freedom from anxiety." ...Read More →

“The growth of things is a tardy process and their undoing is a rapid matter.” Seneca the Younger, in Letters from a Stoic. One of the earliest lessons of childhood is that building something takes a ...Read More →

“No one confines his unhappiness to the present,” Seneca the Younger, in Letters from a Stoic Is it possible for anyone to live in the present? I say it is -for a fraction of the time. Here are some...Read More →

“If we were born in a state of moral enlightenment, wisdom would have been deprived of the best thing about her — that she isn’t one of the things which fortune either gives us or doesn’t. As things...Read More →