The Stoics did not tell people to stop feeling fear. They argued that most of it is built from what we expect, imagine or judge, and that a fear examined closely often shrinks. Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius all make a version of this case, and the 22 passages below are among the clearest.
Every quotation is taken from a public-domain translation (Gummere for Seneca's letters, Matheson and Oldfather for Epictetus, George Long for Marcus) and checked against the text, so the wording is older than the versions you may have seen shared online. If you are after the practical side of fear and worry, the principles from Seneca on fear and anxiety are a good companion to this page.
Fear is usually built in the mind first
The first group is about where fear gets made. Seneca and Epictetus both separate the event from the fear of it, and they put most of the weight on the fear.
There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
Seneca, Letters 13.4 (Gummere). This is the best-known line from the letter, and "imagination" is Gummere's own wording. Seneca's Latin word is closer to "opinion" or "conjecture", but the sense is the same: the suffering comes before the event, and sometimes without it.
What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come.
Seneca, Letters 13.4 (Gummere). A simple test: has the thing you dread actually arrived? Often it has not, and it may not.
That is why no fear is so ruinous and so uncontrollable as panic fear. For other fears are groundless, but this fear is witless.
Seneca, Letters 13.9 (Gummere). In the sentences before this, Seneca blames rumour and guesswork. Panic is fear with the facts left out.
We let ourselves drift with every breeze; we are frightened at uncertainties, just as if they were certain.
Seneca, Letters 13.13 (Gummere). We treat a possibility as a certainty. Before deciding how afraid to be, ask how sure you actually are.
What disturbs men's minds is not events but their judgements on events: For instance, death is nothing dreadful, or else Socrates would have thought it so. No, the only dreadful thing about it is men's judgement that it is dreadful.
Epictetus, Enchiridion 5 (Matheson). Epictetus is not saying that nothing hurts. He is saying that the dread is added by the judgement we make about the event. The much-shared wording "it is not things themselves that trouble people, but their opinions about things" is A. A. Long's translation, which is still in copyright, so it is not quoted here.
For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of hardship or death.
Epictetus, Discourses 2.1.13 (Oldfather). The same idea in one sentence.
But Socrates did well to call all such things “bugbears.” For just as masks appear fearful and terrible to children because of inexperience, in some such manner we also are affected by events, and this for the same reason that children are affected by bugbears.
Epictetus, Discourses 2.1.15 (Oldfather). Epictetus credits the "bugbear" image to Socrates. Adults flinch at a mask for the same reason a child does: they have not looked at it closely.
Look at the thing itself
The second group is about method. The Stoic move is to get closer to the feared thing, not further from it.
That you see happening to boys happens also to ourselves, who are only slightly bigger boys: when those whom they love, with whom they daily associate, with whom they play, appear with masks on, the boys are frightened out of their wits. We should strip the mask, not only from men, but from things, and restore to each object its own aspect.
Seneca, Letters 24.13 (Gummere). The image is of children frightened by masks on people they know well. Strip away the display, and see what is actually there.
assume that what you fear may happen will certainly happen in any event; whatever the trouble may be, measure it in your own mind, and estimate the amount of your fear. You will thus understand that what you fear is either insignificant or short-lived.
Seneca, Letters 24.2 (Gummere). This is the closest thing in the letters to an exercise. Assume the worst realistic outcome, measure it, and compare it with the size of the fear. Seneca then spends the rest of the letter doing exactly that with exile, prison and death.
There is nothing so certain among these objects of fear that it is not more certain still that things we dread sink into nothing and that things we hope for mock us.
Seneca, Letters 13.12 (Gummere). A blunt argument. What we dread tends to dissolve, and what we hope for tends to disappoint, so neither deserves as much weight as we give it.
Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break, but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.49 (Long). Marcus was writing for himself, not for an audience. This is a picture of the steadiness he was trying to practise.
All things are change, yet we need not fear anything new.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.6 (Long). Novelty alone is not a danger. Change is the normal condition of everything, including the things we are worried about.
Penetrate inwards into men’s leading principles, and thou wilt see what judges thou art afraid of, and what kind of judges they are of themselves.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9.18 (Long). Fear of what people think often loosens when you look at the people doing the judging. Do you respect their judgement on anything else?
Hope, the future and the cost of waiting for trouble
Most fear points forward. These passages are about what that costs in the present.
hope and fear, dissimilar as they are, keep step together; fear follows hope.
Seneca, Letters 5.7 (Gummere). Seneca is passing on an idea from the Stoic Hecato. Both hope and fear face an uncertain future, so one rarely turns up without the other.
The present alone can make no man wretched.
Seneca, Letters 5.9 (Gummere). He contrasts people with animals, which avoid the danger they can see and are free of care once it has passed. Memory replays the fear and foresight rehearses it.
And there is nothing more wretched or foolish than premature fear.
Seneca, Letters 98.7 (Gummere). He does not tell you to stop planning. In the same section he says to foresee whatever can be foreseen. His objection is to paying for trouble in advance.
And there is no difference between grief for something lost and the fear of losing it.
Seneca, Letters 98.6 (Gummere). Useful if you are anxious about losing something. The fear already costs you what the loss would.
Fear of death and hardship
Death is its own large subject, covered on the page of Stoic quotes on death. Two passages belong here because they speak directly to fear.
infants, and boys, and those who have gone mad, have no fear of death, and it is most shameful if reason cannot afford us that peace of mind to which they have been brought by their folly.
Seneca, Letters 36.12 (Gummere). A harsh comparison. His claim is that reason ought to be able to give us at least the calm that others have without it.
Keep before your eyes from day to day death and exile and all things that seem terrible, but death most of all, and then you will never set your thoughts on what is low and will never desire anything beyond measure.
Epictetus, Enchiridion 21 (Matheson). The aim is familiarity, not gloom. A hardship you have already thought about loses some of its power to shock.
Courage is not the absence of fear
The Stoics did not equate courage with recklessness. The last group looks at what they thought courage actually was.
he will merely not fear them, though he will avoid them. It is proper for him to be careful, but not to be fearful.
Seneca, Letters 85.26 (Gummere). Seneca is describing the wise person's attitude to danger. Caution survives; the fear does not. Notice that he does not recommend walking into danger for its own sake.
For bravery is not thoughtless rashness, or love of danger, or the courting of fear-inspiring objects; it is the knowledge which enables us to distinguish between that which is evil and that which is not.
Seneca, Letters 85.28 (Gummere). Courage is treated as a kind of knowledge: knowing what is actually bad and what only looks bad. Seneca is also arguing with critics of his school in this letter, so it is worth reading in full.
Well then, no man who is in fear, or sorrow, or turmoil, is free, but whoever is rid of sorrows and fears and turmoils, this man is by the self-same course rid also of slavery.
Epictetus, Discourses 2.1.24 (Oldfather). For Epictetus, fear is a form of being ruled by something outside you, which is why he links the end of fear to freedom.
How to use these quotes
A quotation will not remove a fear. Seneca says in Letter 13 that he is speaking in his "milder style" rather than the strict Stoic line, which is a fair admission that the harder claims are a lot to ask. These passages are tools for a specific moment: you are afraid, and you want to examine the fear rather than obey it.
Two ways to do that, both taken directly from the passages above:
- Write the feared outcome as a single plain sentence, then check whether it has actually happened or only been imagined (Letter 13).
- Assume the worst realistic version happens, measure how large and how long it would be, and compare that with the size of the fear (Letter 24).
If fear is constant, or is getting in the way of daily life, a doctor or therapist is a better first step than a Stoic text. For more of Seneca's letters in context, see the guide to Letters from a Stoic.
Sources
- Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letters 5, 13, 24, 36, 85 and 98, trans. Richard Mott Gummere (Loeb Classical Library, 1917 to 1925).
- Epictetus, Enchiridion, chapters 5 and 21, trans. P. E. Matheson (1916).
- Epictetus, Discourses 2.1, trans. W. A. Oldfather (Loeb Classical Library, 1925).
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.49, 8.6 and 9.18, trans. George Long (1862).
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