The Daily Stoic
Ryan Holiday · 2016
Philosophy
366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
Co-written with Stephen Hanselman, The Daily Stoic offers a year's worth of Stoic meditations — one for each day — drawn from the writings of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, and other Stoic philosophers. Each entry pairs an original translation with a practical reflection on its meaning for modern life.
Context & Background
The Daily Stoic solved a practical problem: how to build a daily Stoic practice. While books like Meditations and Letters from a Stoic are brilliant, they weren't designed as structured daily reading. Holiday and Hanselman created a year-long curriculum organized around the three Stoic disciplines: perception, action, and will.
The book is organized into twelve months, each focusing on a different Stoic theme: Clarity (January), Passions and Emotions (February), Awareness (March), Unbiased Thought (April), Right Action (May), Problem Solving (June), Duty (July), Pragmatism (August), Fortitude and Resilience (September), Virtue and Kindness (October), Acceptance and Amor Fati (November), and Meditation on Mortality (December).
The book has sold over two million copies and created a daily practice for hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. It spawned a successful daily email newsletter, a journal companion, and a broader ecosystem of Stoic practice tools. It is arguably the single most effective gateway drug to ancient philosophy in the modern era.
Quotes from The Daily Stoic
Related Books
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
Same genre — complementary perspectives on Philosophy
Republic
Plato
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