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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast,

where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom

designed to help you find strength, insight, and

wisdom, everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that

has guided some of history's greatest men and women.

For more you can visit us at Dailystone.com.

It made him great.

him great.

Abraham Lincoln was shaped by one book more than any other.

You might guess that would be the Bible given the ease with which he would quote and allude to ideas from it in his speeches and letters over the years.

But Lincoln's faith was actually something that evolved more slowly over time, especially after the tragedies that rocked him later in life.

Instead, when he was young, he fell in love with Aesop's fables.

This was a book he read over and over again, one friend observed.

These fables, written by a slave and a storyteller who lived in ancient Greece around

620 BC, they spoke to Lincoln's soul. He memorized large chunks of the book, his mind, which had always

tended towards anecdotes and story,

just locked on to Aesop's brilliant method for teaching complicated moral lessons and clever

fictions about mice and lions and foxes. It became a lens through which he came to

understand human nature, the language with which he tried to communicate reality

through. You know his famous line about how a house divided against itself cannot

stand?

...