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How to think like a roman emperor, Donald Robertson

  • books Stoicism public

  • Summary

    • Great adept of Stoicism himself, the author, Donald Robertson tells the story of one of the most influential Stoics, the roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.
    • Each period of Marcus Aurelius’ life is illustrated with fundamental teachings of Stoicism, and how he applied them to guide him through life challenges, from adversity, grief, pain, fear, anger, and ultimately death.
    • The author references many great quotes from the philosophical giants of Ancient Greece, such as Socrates and Epicurus, as well as reflections from Marcus Aurelius, extracted from his books of meditations.
    • There are also many references to parallelisms with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, to show that Stoic teachings are still very relevant today, and to put in perspective the incredible wisdom of there lifestyle pioneers.

  • Takeaways

  • Highlights (How to Think Like a Roman Emperor)

    • Socrates said that they should both try to discover how someone could become a good person, because that’s surely more important than knowing where to buy all sorts of goods. (Location 11)
    • Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be; just be one. 4 (Location 15)
    • Nobody is the same person he was yesterday. Realizing this makes it easier to let go: we can no more hold on to life than grasp the waters of a rushing stream. (Location 22)
    • Like all Stoics, Marcus firmly believed that virtue must be its own reward. (Location 28)
    • what the Cynics meant was that our character is the only thing that ultimately matters and that wisdom consists in learning to view everything else in life as utterly worthless by comparison. (Location 33)
    • some external things are preferable to others, and wisdom consists precisely in our ability to make these sorts of value judgments. Life is preferable to death, wealth is preferable to poverty, health is preferable to sickness, friends are preferable to enemies, and so on. (Location 39)
    • How therefore does it profit a man, the Stoics might say, if he gains the whole world but loses his wisdom and virtue? (Location 40)
    • Even the Stoic wise man, therefore, may tremble in the face of danger. What matters is what he does next. (Location 42)
    • Rhetoricians thrive on praise, which is vanity; philosophers love truth and embrace humility. (Location 48)
    • those states prospered where the philosophers were kings or the kings philosophers. (Location 60)
    • They called the goal of this therapy apatheia, meaning not apathy but rather freedom from harmful desires and emotions (passions). (Location 62)
    • human capacity for thought allows us to perpetuate our worries beyond these natural bounds. Reason, our greatest blessing, is also our greatest curse. (Location 64)
    • Zeno even symbolized this concept by the physical gesture of clenching his fist—we still talk today of someone who looks at events in a matter-of-fact way as “having a firm grip on reality.” (Location 72)
    • Decatastrophizing involves reevaluating the probability and severity of something bad happening and framing it in more realistic terms. (Location 74)
    • “What virtues has Nature given me that might help me deal with the situation better?” (Location 75)
    • Epictetus: “It’s not things that upset us but our judgments about things,” (Location 77)
    • This sort of technique is referred to as “cognitive distancing” in CBT, because it requires sensing the separation or distance between our thoughts and external reality. Beck defined it as a “metacognitive” process, meaning a shift to a level of awareness involving “thinking about thinking.” (Location 77)
    • “Distancing” refers to the ability to view one’s own thoughts (or beliefs) as constructions of “reality” rather than as reality itself. (Location 77)
    • However, we can also look at the glasses themselves and realize that they color our vision. (Location 77)
    • It’s a contradiction to believe both that you must do something and also that it’s not within your power to do so. The Stoics viewed this confusion as the root cause of most emotional suffering. (Location 79)
    • anger is nothing but temporary madness and that its consequences are often irreparable, (Location 84)
    • sheep don’t vomit up grass to show the shepherds how much they’ve eaten but rather digest their food inwardly and produce good wool and milk outwardly. (Location 87)
    • The Stoics realized that to communicate wisely, we must phrase things appropriately. (Location 93)
    • we desire to learn wisdom, we must be ready to listen to anyone we encounter and show gratitude “not to those who flatter us but to those who rebuke us.” 14 (Location 94)
    • “we should act carefully in all things—just as if we were going to answer for it to our teachers shortly thereafter.” (Location 95)
    • just as someone who walks barefoot is cautious not to step on a nail or twist his ankle, they should be careful throughout the day not to harm their own character by lapsing into errors of moral judgment. (Location 96)
    • If he could read your mind, how would he comment on your thoughts and feelings? (Location 96)
      1. What would the consequences be if you acted as a slave to your passions? 2. How would your day differ if you acted more rationally, exhibiting wisdom and self-discipline? (Location 105)
    • knowing that you are going to cross-examine yourself at the end of the day can have a similar effect. It forces you to pay more attention to your conduct throughout the day. (Location 106)
    • “What use am I now making of my soul?” (Location 107)
      1. Desired. The things you most desire for yourself in life 2. Admired. The qualities you find most praiseworthy and admirable in other people (Location 109)
    • Once you clarify your core values, you can compare them to the Stoic cardinal virtues of wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation. (Location 109)
    • the fundamental goal of life for Stoics, the highest good, is to act consistently in accord with reason and virtue. (Location 109)
    • As Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” (Location 111)
    • For Stoics, in other words, the tale of Hercules symbolizes the epic challenge of deciding who we really want to be in life, the promise of philosophy, and the temptation of giving in to pleasure and vice. (Location 121)
    • The Stoics believed that entertainment, sex, food, and even alcohol have their place in life—they’re neither good nor bad in themselves. However, when pursued excessively, they can become unhealthy. (Location 127)
    • The Stoics tended to view joy not as the goal of life, which is wisdom, but as a by-product of it, (Location 131)
    • Joy in the Stoic sense is fundamentally active rather than passive; it comes from perceiving the virtuous quality of our own deeds, the things we do, whereas bodily pleasures arise from experiences that happen to us, even if they’re a consequence of actions like eating, drinking, or having sex. (Location 132)
    • The wise man’s sense of delight comes from one thing alone: acting consistently in accord with virtue. (Location 132)
    • Nobody has ever had the words “I wish I’d watched more television” or “I wish I’d spent more time on Facebook” engraved on their tombstone. (Location 135)
    • Evaluate the consequences of your habits or desires in order to select which ones to change. 2. Spot early warning signs so that you can nip problematic desires in the bud. 3. Gain cognitive distance by separating your impressions from external reality. 4. Do something else instead of engaging in the habit. (Location 136)
    • In fact, really thinking through consequences of behaviors and picturing them vividly in your mind may be enough in some cases to eliminate the behavior. (Location 138)
    • “depreciation by analysis.” 16 That means breaking any problem down into small chunks that seem less emotionally powerful or overwhelming. (Location 144)
    • when engaged in certain actions, such as bad habits of the kind we’ve been discussing, Marcus advised pausing and asking of each step: “Does death appear terrible because I would be deprived of this?” (Location 144)
    • Marcus would sometimes look at roasted meats and other delicacies and murmur to himself, “This is a dead bird, a dead fish, a dead pig.” (Location 146)
    • they are able to enjoy pleasures in a healthy way, within reasonable bounds, remembering that they are temporary and not wholly under our control. (Location 150)
    • feeling gratitude instead of desire. (Location 151)
    • If we don’t occasionally picture loss, reminding ourselves what life might be like without the things and people we love, we would take them for granted. (Location 152)
    • The wise man is grateful for the gifts life has given him, but he also reminds himself that they are merely on loan—everything changes and nothing lasts forever. (Location 152)
    • The point is that chronic pain beyond our ability to endure would have killed us, so the fact we’re still standing proves that we’re capable of enduring much worse. (Location 163)
    • “Pain is neither unendurable nor everlasting, if you keep its limits in mind and do not add to it through your own imagination.” 13 (Location 164)
    • You could call this a form of stress inoculation: you learn to build up resistance to a bigger problem by voluntarily exposing yourself repeatedly to something similar, albeit in smaller doses or a milder form. (Location 165)
    • Epictetus was no more perturbed by his crippled leg than he was by his inability to grow wings and fly—he simply accepted it as one of the many things in life that were beyond his control. (Location 167)
    • “For death or pain is not fearsome, but rather the fear of pain or death.” (Location 174)
    • “Do what you must, let happen what may,” (Location 194)
    • Nothing is entirely under your control, except your own volition. (Location 196)
    • Seneca calls this praemeditatio malorum, or the “premeditation of adversity.” (Location 198)
    • Begin the morning by saying to yourself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. (Location 198)
    • He tells himself that resilience comes from his ability to regain his composure wherever he finds himself. This is the “inner citadel” to which he can retreat, even on the frigid battlefields of the northern campaign. (Location 206)
    • The universe is change: life is opinion. (Location 208)
    • This is what Marcus meant by “life is opinion”: that the quality of our life is determined by our value judgments, because those shape our emotions. (Location 208)
    • “If this will seem trivial to me twenty years from now, then why shouldn’t I view it as trivial today instead of worrying about it as if it’s a catastrophe?” (Location 209)
    • People sometimes don’t even realize that what they’re doing is worrying. They may confuse it with problem-solving, believing that they’re trying to “figure out a solution” when in fact they’re just going in circles making their anxiety worse and worse. (Location 210)
    • Chrysippus reputedly said that with the passage of time, “emotional inflammation abates” and as reason returns, finding room to function properly, it can then expose the irrational nature of our passions. (Location 213)
    • They believed that anger is a form of desire: “a desire for revenge on one who seems to have done an injustice inappropriately,” (Location 229)
    • “Nor can I be angry with my kinsman nor hate him for we have come into being for co-operation,” (Location 233)
    • The idea is that we should broaden our awareness, not only thinking of the person’s actions that offend us but of the other person as a whole, remembering that nobody is perfect. (Location 234)
    • The Stoics believed that vicious people fundamentally lack self-love and are alienated from themselves. We must learn to empathize with them and see them as the victims of misguided beliefs or errors of judgment, not as malicious. (Location 235)
    • no man does evil knowingly, which also entails that no man does it willingly. (Location 235)
    • Marcus thinks the rest of humanity deserves our love insofar as they are our kin. Yet they also deserve our compassion, he says, insofar as they are ignorant of good and evil, a handicap as severe as visual blindness. (Location 236)
    • repeat this maxim to themselves: “It seemed right to him.” 11 (Location 237)
    • You should always remain open to the possibility that the other person’s intentions are not in the wrong. (Location 239)
    • When we remember that nothing lasts forever, it no longer seems worthwhile getting angry with other people. (Location 240)
    • By realizing that another person’s actions can’t harm your character, (Location 240)
    • All that really matters in life is whether you’re a good person or a bad person, and that’s down to you alone. (Location 241)
    • Ironically, anger does the most harm to the person experiencing it, although he has the power to stop it. (Location 242)
    • If someone hates you, Marcus says, that’s their problem. Your only concern is to avoid doing anything to deserve being hated. (Location 242)
    • Stoic should aim at the target (of benefiting others) but be satisfied if he has acted with kindness, and willing to accept both success and failure with equanimity. (Location 243)
    • For Stoics, kindness first and foremost means educating others or wishing they would become wise, free from vice and passion. (Location 244)
    • It’s a desire to turn enemies into friends, Fate permitting. (Location 244)
    • Go to the rising sun, for I am already setting. (Location 253)
    • “Only a madman seeks figs in winter.” (Location 255)
    • Alexander the Great and his mule driver both reduced to dust, made equals at last by death. (Location 257)
    • I must die, but must I die groaning? For it’s not death that upsets us but our judgments about it. (Location 259)
    • To practice death in advance is to practice freedom and to prepare oneself to let go of life gracefully. (Location 259)
    • I was dead for countless eons before my birth, and it did not vex me then. I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care—as the Epicureans say. (Location 260)

Referenced in

How to think like a roman emperor, Donald Robertson