Marcus Aurelius

“I think a lot of people, they spend all this time trying to create this, not just success now, but this monument that endures for all time, as if that's of value. Like, it isn't. It's not only something you don't control, even if it was guaranteed. It doesn't …”

“That's one of the most famous people who ever lived in their own life, and he's mostly forgotten, and if the movie Gladiator didn't exist, he'd be even more forgotten.”

“What I think makes Marx real is such a fascinating example. Here you have one of the few humans to hold absolute power as we Would really define it and doesn't seem to have become deranged or grotesque is into an overwhelmingly cautionary tale. That to me is a…”

“We have a couple of stories of Mark's realest crying, but we don't have any stories of him losing his temper.”

“There's actually a protest at Brown University the last couple years. They wanted to pull down, there's a stat, an equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on campus,”

“Ryan holiday is more famous than Marcus Aurelius and Seneca to most people today, because he's the one who's delivering the mess, the message. About stoicism in a way that people can understand nowadays via TikTok, via Twitter, via Instagram, via his books.”

“Every generation needs its own translation because a book like Mark Ceruleus, he's writing to himself in colloquial personal language. So, when you see, like, thou shall not, that's not, he didn't say that. That's what someone in the Like, 17th century would h…”

“The reason Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus are also the most famous is because their works survive the most completely. So all you really get from the other people are fragments anyway.”