The Stoic Jew

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:12 – If you complete the present work, following the rule of reason, earnestly, with all your might, with kindness, and allow nothing to distract you, but preserve your own divine element pure and upright, as if you have this moment to restore it; if you make this secure, expecting nothing and avoiding nothing, but content with present a...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:11 – To the above supports let one more be added. Always make a figure or outline of the imagined object as it occurs, in order to see distinctly what it is in its essence, naked, as a whole and parts; and say to yourself its individual name and the names of the things of which it was compounded and into which it will be broken up. For n...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:13 – As doctors have their instruments and scalpels always at hand to meet sudden demands for treatment, so do you have your principles ready for the understanding of things divine and human, and for doing everything, even the very smallest, with mindfulness of the bond which unites the divine and human; for you will not do any act well...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:11 – To the above supports let one more be added. Always make a figure or outline of the imagined object as it occurs, in order to see distinctly what it is in its essence, naked, as a whole and parts; and say to yourself its individual name and the names of the things of which it was compounded and into which it will be broken up. For n...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:10 – Therefore throw all else aside, and hold fast only these few things; further calling to mind at the same time that each of us lives only in the present, this brief moment; the rest is either a life that is past, or is in an uncertain future. Short then is the time which every man lives, and small the nook of the earth where he lives...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:9 – Reverence your faculty of judgment. On this it entirely rests that your governing self no longer has a judgment disobedient to Nature and to the estate of a rational being. This judgment promises deliberateness (or: freedom from hasty judgment), familiar friendship with men, and obedience to God. -------------------------------------...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:8 – In the mind of a man of chastened and purified spirit you will find no trace of festering wound, no ulceration, no abscess beneath the skin. The hour of fate does not surprise his life before its fulfillment, so that one would say that the actor is leaving the stage before he has fulfilled his role, before the play is over. You will...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:7 – Never value as an advantage to yourself what will force you one day to break your word, to abandon self-respect, to hate, to suspect, to curse another, to act the hypocrite, to covet anything that calls for walls or coverings to conceal it. A man who puts first his own mind and divine element, and the holy rites of its excellence, ma...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:6 – If you discover in the life of man something higher than justice, truth, temperance, fortitude, and generally speaking than your understanding contented with itself, where it presents you behaving by the rule of right, and satisfied with destiny, in what is assigned to you and is not yours to choose; if, I say, you see something high...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:5 – Do not act unwillingly nor selfishly nor without self-examination, nor with divergent motives. Let no affectation veneer your thinking. Be neither a busy talker, nor a busybody. Moreover let the divine element within be the guardian of a real man, a man of ripe years, a statesman, a Roman, a magistrate, who has taken his post like on...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:4 – Do not waste the balance of life left to you in thoughts about other persons, when you are not referring to some advantage of your fellows—for why do you rob yourself of something else which you might do— I mean if you imagine to yourself what so and so is doing, and why; what he is saying or thinking or planning, and every thought o...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:3 – Hippocrates, after curing many sicknesses, himself fell sick and died. The Chaldean astrologers foretold the death of many persons, then the hour of fate overtook them also. Alexander, Pompeius, and Julius Caesar, after so often utterly destroying whole towns and slaying in the field many myriads of horse and foot, themselves also on...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:2 – We must also observe closely points of this kind, that even the secondary effects of Nature's processes possess a sort of grace and attraction. To take one instance, bread when it is being baked breaks open at some places; now even these cracks, which in one way contradict the promise of the baker's art, somehow catch the e...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:1 – We ought to take into account not only the fact that day by day life is being spent and a smaller balance remaining, but this further point also that, should we live longer, it is at least doubtful whether the intellect will hereafter be the same, still sufficient to comprehend events and the speculation which contributes to the unde...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:17 – Of man's life, his time is a point, his existence a flux, his sensation clouded, his body's entire composition corruptible, his vital spirit an eddy of breath, his fortune hard to predict, his fame uncertain. Briefly, all the things of the body, a river; all the things of the spirit, dream and delirium; his life a warfare...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:16 – The soul of a man does violence to itself, first and foremost when it becomes an abscess and, as it were, a tumor on the universe, so far as it can. For to be vexed at anything which happens is a separation of ourselves from nature, in some part of which the natures of all other things are contained. Secondly, the soul does violence...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:15 – “Everything is what you judge it to be. [1] ” While the retort made to the Cynic philosopher Monimus is obvious enough, obvious too is the use of the saying, if one only take the gist of it, so far as it is true. [1] Alternative translations: “opinion,” “assumption”; hupolepsis , hypolepsis, u(po/lhyis ; Seddon writes “opinion cover...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:14 – Even were you about to live three thousand years or thrice ten thousand, nevertheless remember this, that no one loses any other life than this which he is living, nor lives any other than this which he is losing. Thus the longest and shortest come to the same thing. For the present is equal to all, and what is passing is therefore...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:13 – Nothing is more wretched than the man who goes round and round everything, and, as Pindar says, “pries into the things beneath the earth,” and seeks by conjecture what is in the minds of his neighbors, but fails to perceive that it is enough to attend to the divinity that is within himself and to do it genuine service. Now that serv...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:12 – How all things are vanishing swiftly, bodies themselves in the universe and the memorials of them in time; what is the character of all the things of sense, and most of all those which attract by the bait of pleasure or terrify by the threat of pain or are shouted abroad by vanity, how cheap, contemptible, soiled, corruptible, and m...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:11 – In the conviction that it is possible you may depart from life at once, act and speak and think in every case accordingly. But to leave the company of men is nothing to fear, if God exists; for He would not involve you in ill. If, however, He does not exist or if He takes no care for man’s affairs, why should I go on living in a wor...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:10 – Like a true philosopher Theophrastus says, when comparing, as men commonly do compare, various faults, that errors committed through desire are graver than errors committed through anger. For clearly one who loses his temper is turning away from reason with a kind of pain and inward spasm, whereas he who offends through desire is th...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:9 – Always remember the following: what the nature of the whole is, what is my own nature, the relation of this nature to that, what kind of part it is of what kind of whole, and that no man can hinder your saying and doing at all times what is in accordance with that nature whereof you are a part. ---------- If you have questions, comme...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:8 – Men are not easily seen as to be brought into evil case by failure to consider what passes in another’s soul; but they who do not read aright the motions of their own soul are bound to be in evil case. ---------- If you have questions, comments, or feedback, I would love to hear from you! Please feel free to contact me at rabbischnee...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:7 – Do things from outside break in to distract you? Give yourself a time of quiet to learn some new good thing and cease to wander out of your course. But, when you have done that, be on guard against a second kind of wandering. For those who are sick to death in life, with no mark on which they direct every impulse or in general every...