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August 12th

MAKE THE WORDS YOUR OWN

“Many words have been spoken by Plato, Zeno, Chrysippus,

Posidonius, and by a whole host of equally excellent Stoics. I’ll

tell you how people can prove their words to be their own—by

putting into practice what they’ve been preaching.”

—SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 108.35; 38

ne of the criticisms of Stoicism by modern translators and teachers is
the amount of repetition. Marcus Aurelius, for example, has been
dismissed by academics as not being original because his writing resembles
that of other, earlier Stoics. This criticism misses the point.
Even before Marcus’s time, Seneca was well aware that there was a lot
of borrowing and overlap among the philosophers. That’s because real
philosophers weren’t concerned with authorship, only what worked. More
important, they believed that what was said mattered less than what was
done.
And this is as true now as it was then. You’re welcome to take all of the
words of the great philosophers and use them to your own liking (they’re
dead; they don’t mind). Feel free to tweak and edit and improve as you like.
Adapt them to the real conditions of the real world. The way to prove that
you truly understand what you speak and write, that you truly are original,
is to put them into practice. Speak them with your actions more than
anything else.