October 26, 2026

Cure One Fault Today

Sextius had this habit: when the day was over, and he had betaken himself to rest, he would put the following questions to his soul: What bad habit have you cured to-day? What vice have you checked? In what respect are you better?

Seneca wrote this in On Anger, likely during his years advising the young emperor Nero, a time when he saw firsthand how quickly temper could wreck both private character and public life. He attributes the practice to Quintus Sextius, an earlier Roman philosopher who closed each day with three plain questions to his own soul: what ailment was cured, what vice resisted, in what way he was better. Seneca adopted the habit himself, treating moral progress like a ledger that must be checked daily instead of left to drift. For the Stoics, self-examination was not self-punishment but training: a calm, specific, unsparing audit of one's own acts, done so that today's faults become tomorrow's corrections. Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus inherited this same discipline, rooted even earlier in Pythagorean practice, making nightly and morning review one of Stoicism's most enduring daily tools.

A principle of Stoicism: Daily Self-Examination →