The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks The 4 Stoic Virtues: Your Compass for a Meaningful Life
Dec 8, 2025
Feeling lost? Explore the four Stoic virtues: wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance, each a guiding light for life's challenges. Learn how wisdom helps you focus on what you can control, while courage means acting on your values despite fear. Justice emphasizes treating others fairly to foster community. Discover the balance of temperance in a world of excess. Packed with practical exercises and modern examples, this discussion reveals how these 2,000-year-old principles can help you live a more meaningful life today.
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Virtue As Holistic Human Excellence
- Stoic virtue (arete) means holistic excellence: intellectual, physical, and moral fulfillment.
- It's about fulfilling your role and potential within society, not just saintly morality.
The Four Virtues As Practical Skills
- The four Stoic virtues are wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance, framed as practical skills.
- Jon Brooks renames them: practical wisdom, steadfast courage, fair dealing, and self-regulation to highlight actionability.
Character Good Versus External Conditions
- Stoics classify things as character good, character bad, or conditions (preferred/dispreferred indifferents).
- What matters is whether events help or harm your character and how you respond shapes that judgment.
