O

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.