https://bookstoic.com/tags/short/Recent content in Short on BookStoicHugoenSat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0100https://bookstoic.com/books/enchiridion/Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0100https://bookstoic.com/books/enchiridion/<blockquote> <p>Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing; not within our power are our body, our property, reputation, office, and, in a word, whatever is not of our own doing.</p> <p><cite>Epictetus, <em>Enchiridion</em>, 1, after Elizabeth Carter</cite></p> </blockquote> <h2 id="what-it-is">What it is</h2> <p>Epictetus was a freed slave who taught philosophy at Nicopolis in Greece around the year 100. He wrote nothing. His student Arrian took down the lectures, publishing them as the <em>Discourses</em>, and then boiled them down into this handbook. It is fifty three numbered paragraphs, most of them a few sentences long, and the first one contains the rest.</p>https://bookstoic.com/books/on-the-shortness-of-life/Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0100https://bookstoic.com/books/on-the-shortness-of-life/<blockquote> <p>It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested.</p> <p><cite>Seneca, <em>On the Shortness of Life</em>, 1, after Aubrey Stewart</cite></p> </blockquote> <h2 id="what-it-is">What it is</h2> <p>One of Seneca&rsquo;s ten moral essays and the most read. The claim is in the first paragraph: life is not short, it is squandered. The rest of the essay is a catalogue of the ways, from ambition to leisure that is not really leisure, and a closing invitation to spend time with the philosophers of the past instead.</p>