The best Stoic quotes come from three Roman writers whose works survive complete: Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, Seneca's Letters, and Epictetus's Enchiridion. Every quote below is cited to its work and passage, using public-domain translations (George Long, Richard Mott Gummere, Elizabeth Carter — lightly modernized), so you can check the original context rather than trust an unsourced image caption.
Marcus Aurelius quotes
Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations as private notes to himself — which is why his lines read like instructions rather than aphorisms. (More about him and the book: Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher emperor.)
Confine yourself to the present.
Take away your opinion, and the complaint "I have been harmed" is taken away. Take away the complaint, and the harm is gone.
The soul is dyed by the thoughts.
The best way of avenging yourself is not to become like the wrongdoer.
No longer talk about the kind of man a good man ought to be, but be one.
It is possible you may depart from life this very moment; regulate every act and thought accordingly.
Seneca quotes
Seneca's Letters to Lucilius are the most readable Stoic texts — practical advice from a busy statesman to a friend, on everything from grief to crowds to time.
We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is.
If a man does not know to what port he is steering, no wind is favorable to him.
Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well-ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.
Epictetus quotes
Epictetus was born enslaved and became Rome's most demanding teacher of practical philosophy. His Enchiridion ("Handbook") opens with the sentence the whole philosophy rests on.
Some things are in our control and others not.
Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.
Do not demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.
Everything has two handles: one by which it may be carried, the other by which it cannot.
Stoic quotes on control
The dichotomy of control is stoicism's first lesson, and every Stoic author returns to it: Epictetus's "some things are in our control and others not" (Enchiridion 1), Marcus's reminder that harm lives in our opinion of events (Meditations 4.7), and Seneca's observation that imagined troubles outnumber real ones (Letters 13.4). If you keep only one Stoic idea, keep this one — the full principle is explained here.
Stoic quotes on adversity and death (memento mori)
The Stoics kept mortality in view as fuel for action, not gloom — memento mori, "remember that you die." Marcus's starkest version is Meditations 2.11 above: since you may depart this very moment, act accordingly. Seneca's letters return constantly to wasted time as the only real loss. The point of both is the same: urgency without panic.
How to use these quotes
A Stoic quote works best as a prompt, not a poster: take one line in the morning, carry it through the day, and check against it in the evening. That is precisely the practice the Stoics themselves followed — and the one our guide to practicing stoicism daily walks you through.