Reviews - Meditations | The StoryGraph

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3.38k reviews for:

i feel like the people who love the four agreements also love this bullshit

i got halfway through this book before i couldn’t do it anymore so I’m counting it as read, i read it bc it was on a lot of people’s lists of books that changed their lives

ok i can see if you cherry pick very specific quotes there could be something there, but taken with all the other bullshit in there…i cannot

timnowotny's review against another edition

3.0

When I looked at the recommendations I saw either love or hate reviews. Now I know why. This was a very frustrating reading experience for me. ON the one hand you have really great sentences and morale. On the other hand these are private musings that are often more for the writer than for the reader.
I missed the focus and story of Seneca but enjoyed the more practical approach. To get into Stoism this is a bad entry.
(Note to myself: Read like one of the most radical "Form follows function" tantrums)

s_sunshine2's review against another edition

5.0

hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

h0llace's review against another edition

2.0

I like some of the Stoic ideas (accepting what you can and cannot control, managing your reactions to experiences — it is your reaction that is negative, and your reaction can be changed vs. "this bad thing happened and I am therefore upset," the futility of behaving for legacy, understanding that people are just trying to their best). But some I disliked (man's superiority over nature, upper class' superiority over lower class, that the universe is perfect and therefore every life is perfect and we would not be dealt a bad hand unless it was meant to be (feeds into the elitist classism of this philosophy), Aurelius' overall misanthropy). I also was not a fan of how convoluted the system of Stoicism is (command center, assent, all the different categories of pleasure and virtue, etc.). I found both Aurelius' entries and Waterfield's annotations to be tedious and repetitive. I think I would have enjoyed reading a book or article about Stoicism with prominent quotations from Aurelius rather than the primary source more.

hannahholm's review against another edition

3.0

I’m not going to write a review because I got to talk through it instead but to sum up: I had to google if one of the Kens talks about it in the deprograming Barbie scene because it would have fit right in to that aesthetic