This is a Line Worth Remembering | A Cure For The Self

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. This is a line worth remembering. Have you ever read a line in a book that helps you understand life in a new way? Song lyric that nails exactly how you're feeling? A piece of advice that gives you a rule to follow in countless situations?

You're not the only one. We see Marcus Aurelius do this in meditations repeatedly, quoting lines from Epictetus, from poems, from plays, And as it happens, George Washington did this too. His favorite play was Cato by Joseph Addison. This play about the Roman senator and Stoic philosopher was written in seventeen twelve, and was hugely famous in the eighteenth century, and Washington liked to quote one line that must have resonated with him the way certain quotes resonate

with us today. Free, he said, in a letter to a friend after the Revolution about his return to private life, from the bustle of camp and the intrigues of court, I shall view the busy world in the calm light of mild philosophy. In fact, in a single two week period in 1797, Washington quoted that same line, The calm light of mild philosophy. Three different letters.

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