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Fear & Anxiety

We suffer more in imagination than in reality, Seneca writes, and Stoic practice on fear largely follows from that. Most dread concerns the future, which is to say it concerns something that does not exist yet and may never. Their counter-move is not positive thinking but the opposite: rehearse the thing you are afraid of, in detail, until you have taken its measure. The exercise was called premeditation of evils, and the point is that anticipated misfortune arrives smaller than the version fear had been advertising.

42 passages

"The ceasing of action, impulse, judgement is a pause and a kind of death, not any evil."

— Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations 9.21

"To escape from fear, however great it may be, can never be so pleasant as to live in sound unassailable safety."

— Seneca, On Benefits 6.28

"Keep before your eyes day by day death and exile, and everything that seems terrible, but most of all death; and then you will never have any abject thought, nor will you yearn for anything beyond measure."

— Epictetus, The Enchiridion 21

"Penetrate within, into their governing selves, and you will see what critics you fear, and what poor critics they are of themselves."

— Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations 9.18

"There are some things which are unable to hurt us, and whose power is exclusively beneficial and salutary, as, for example, the immortal gods, who neither wish nor are able to do harm: for their temperament is naturally gentle and tranquil, and no more likely to wrong others than to wrong themselves."

— Seneca, On Anger 2.27

"Is it change that a man fears?"

— Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations 7.18

"Why then be troubled?"

— Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations 9.39

"Let not the future trouble you; for you will come to it, if come you must, bearing with you the same reason which you are using now to meet the present."

— Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations 7.08

"But to leave the company of men is nothing to fear, if gods exist; for they would not involve you in ill."

— Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations 2.11

"You have escaped from all accidents, jealousies, diseases: you have escaped from prison: the gods have not thought you worthy of ill-fortune, but have thought that fortune no longer deserved to have any power over you": but when any one shrinks back in the hour of death and looks longingly at life, we must lay hands upon him."

— Seneca, On Peace of Mind 1.16

In summary

This is one of the smaller topics on the site, and that is a fact about the corpus rather than an oversight. The Stoics rarely treat fear on its own; it turns up inside their discussions of death, poverty, exile and disgrace, because for them fear is always fear of some particular thing wrongly rated as an evil. So if the passages here feel thin, the argument you want is probably next door - under death, adversity, or wealth and fame.