August 15, 2026

Ask Yourself Three Questions

Do not allow sleep to close your eyelids after going to bed, until you have examined all your actions of the day by your reason. Wherein have I done amiss? What have I done? What have I omitted that I ought to have done?

Hierocles wrote his commentary on the old Pythagorean Golden Verses at a time when philosophy schools still trained students in daily habits of conduct, not just doctrines to memorize. The Golden Verses closed with an instruction that generations of Stoics and Pythagoreans alike took as a nightly discipline: before sleep, walk back through the whole day and ask plainly what was done wrong, what was done well, and what was left undone. Hierocles insists on the order and the honesty of the exercise, treating the mind almost like a steward checking a ledger rather than a judge looking for someone to punish. Seneca later described practicing this very habit, learned from his teacher Sextius, going over his entire day each night in the dark before sleeping. The Stoic tradition holds that character is not built by grand resolutions but by this small, repeated act of noticing specific successes and specific failures, one day at a time.

A principle of Stoicism: Daily Self-Examination →