Book description
"To relax the mind is to lose it."
Gaius Musonius Rufus (c. AD 30–100) was one of the four great Roman Stoic philosophers, the other three being Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Musonius’s pupil Epictetus. Rufus taught philosophy in Rome during the reign of Nero, as a consequence of which he…
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Why read it?
1 author picked Lectures and Fragments as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Musonius was a celebrated teacher who was thrice banished from Rome. He would often turn would-be students away, explaining to a young Epictetus that “the more one pushes the intelligent person away from the life he was born for, the more he inclines towards it.” His school, he often said, was not some concert hall, where people come to be entertained, but a hospital, where they come, in trepidation, to be treated. Thus, he measured the success of his lectures not by the applause that they received, but by the shock and awe to which they gave rise. The twenty-one…
From Neel's list on The best books on Stoicism, from a psychiatrist and philosopher.
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