What does /lit/ think about this?

Pretty good, but the advice in it is ultimately at the prejudice of the reader.

>>8593893
It's definitely a book. I looked inside it a few times and found words, some of them in sentences. One time I even read it so I can confirm that it is a book.

>Philosophy became a disease in his mind and cut him off from the truths of practical life. He was steeped in the grossest superstition; he surrounded himself with charlatans and magicians, and took with seriousness even the knavery of Alexander of Abonoteichos. The highest offices in the empire were sometimes conferred on his philosophic teachers, whose lectures he attended even after he became emperor. In the midst of the Parthian war he found time to keep a kind of private diary, his famous "Meditations", or twelve short books of detached thoughts and sentences in which he gave over to posterity the results of a rigorous self-examination. With the exception of a few letters discovered among the works of Fronto (M. Corn. Frontonis Reliquiae, Berlin, 1816) this history of his inner life is the only work which we have from his pen. The style is utterly without merit and distinction, apparently a matter of pride for he tells us he had learned to abstain from rhetoric, and poetry, and fine writing. Though a Stoic deeply rooted in the principles developed by Seneca and Epictetus, Aurelius cannot be said to have any consistent system of philosophy. It might be said, perhaps, in justice to this "seeker after righteousness", that his faults were the faults of his philosophy rooted in the principle that human nature naturally inclined towards evil and needed to be constantly kept in check. Only once does he refer to Christianity (Medit., XI, iii), a spiritual regenerative force that was visibly increasing its activity, and then only to brand the Christians with the reproach of obstinacy (parataxis), the highest social crime in the eyes of Roman authority. He seems also (ibid.) to look on Christian martyrdom as devoid of the serenity and calm that should accompany the death of the wise man.

DROPPED

Helped me a lot when I was lost in life.

>>8593919
how?

>>8593893

This piece of shit is spammed on this board every other fucking day.

Diogenes and Cicero are better.

>>8593938
Diogenes doesn't even have any surviving works you tool

>>8593938
what makes them better?

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In my opinion, his bust, is all the meditation I need. The calm and stoic expression on his face emanates the manliness in him. His curly hair and curly beard makes his face more aesthetically pleasing to look at. I strive to be like him. He's my ideal.

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>>8593910
>It's a Christian historian thinks badly of someone for not being a Christian even though it is no way reasonable to expect them to be episode

>>8593949
That's why he's better. You can shitpost without even having to pretend you are interested in literature.

>>8594248
>It's a neo-Christian thinking actual Christianity doesn't hold that practically every human emotion, thought, or deed is a sin episode

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99% of readers won't understand the logic.

Pseuds use it to support their own self-pity self-victimizing ideologies.

Stoicism is in the same boat as Buddhism in that respect. They read them as:
>"Life is suffering and if you accept that you are a winner, you are so brave to be alive"

>“If any man can prove that any action or idea of mine is wrong, I will accept the fact gladly. I only seek the truth, which never injured anyone.”
Marcus Aurelius is my ideal.

Just a lamer version of Christianity.

>>8593893

hes got a lot of nigger hair

bretty gud

Read Hávamál if you seek some additional good advice.

Aurelius is based.

>>8597117
Is Håvamål actually worth reading?

I don't like it. Stoicism teaches us to accept and be complacent rather than change things.

>>8597140
Yes. The Eddas are worth it even if for literary reasons only.

Hávamál is basically a long list of maxims and advice for men, so to say. The values and wisdom they valued back in the day in a nutshell. It also helps you understand the importance of runes and how Odin got them and shit. And you can read it fairly quickly online, since it's a poem, or even listen to it.

>>8593959
>stoic expression

>>8593893
Could have been one third the size and have the exact same content. Almost verbatum repeating entire pages gets boring fast. Yes, Marcus, we know in the end we will all become dust and equal, you hack.

>>8593893
Stoicism is idiotic because it assumes the universe (Nature) is rationally ordered. Well, there is no such thing as Nature, and Stoicism falls apart.

>>8597966
Marcus actually observes that a Stoic 'ordered', logos-infused universe is in practice indistinguishable from an Epicurean disordered, atomic one.

>>8597143
I said this in class once, and the professor fucked my shit up by telling me about Senecas views on slavery.

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>>8593910
>tfw your private journal of random thoughts and musings becomes public
>tfw people argue over your philosophy
>tfw critics hate
>tfw you just wanted to write down some feel in some common papyrus

Little did you know it would be discussed on a croation drag racing forum.

>>8598076
I witnessed this once myself. I didn't know at the time much about it, but it somehow didn't surprise me that Seneca had such views.

Moral letters to Lucilius; Letter #47, I think, if anyone is interested.

>>8597143
>>8597966
Could you both actually learn something about stoicism before spouting your bullshit?

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stoicism/

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>>8595396
>it's an atheist thinking that Christianity is some sort of Manicheanism episode

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>>8599979
Let me guess, you take those bits of Confessions where Augustine curses himself for looking at a lizard, or those many writings of Alphonsus de Ligouri where he damns all literature not directly oriented towards the Church's aims, as somehow inapplicable to you.
Pure Christianity is a totalitarian hellcult and you should be glad it's diluted and ever been corrupted by the spirit of life.

>>8593893
I've been intending to read this. I hope it's good.

MUCH EXCITE!

>>8593893

In real life I've only heard it talked about by the type of self-improvement betas who go to the gym and have reddit accounts.

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>>8600011
The doctrine of original sin to which you are alluding is an innovation of the Catholic Church and was introduced by the former Manichean Augustine.

>>8595489
>>"Life is suffering and if you accept that you are a winner, you are so brave to be alive"


as opposed to what?

>>8600052
Pelagianism is a heresy in the East as well as the West you fool.

>>8600084
But we only inherit the consequences of original sin, not the personal guilt associated with it.

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You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power--how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? To live--is not that just endeavoring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"--how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise-- and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves--Stoicism is self-tyranny--Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature? . . . But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to "creation of the world," the will to the causa prima.

>>8593910
>>8600141
Stoics btfo. What now?