Stoic Philosophy App

"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." — Marcus Aurelius

A multi-page Streamlit application for exploring Stoic philosophy — rotating quotes, philosopher profiles, and an AI-powered Stoic advisor that draws on a curated knowledge base to answer your questions with genuine wisdom.

Live App → stoicisim-daily.streamlit.app

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What It Does

Page	Description
Home	A Stoic quote that rotates every minute, cycling through all 102 quotes before repeating. Never the same quote twice in a row.
Stoic Philosophers	Expandable cards for 13 key Stoic figures across 23 centuries — from Zeno of Citium to James Stockdale. Each card includes a biography, key work, and a curious historical fact. Fully searchable.
Stoic Chat	An AI advisor powered by Groq (Llama 3.1) and a local RAG pipeline. Ask anything about Stoic philosophy, ethics, or how to apply ancient wisdom to modern life.

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The AI Chat — How It Works

The Stoic Chat page is more than a chatbot with a Stoic system prompt. It uses a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline:

1. At startup, every quote and philosopher bio is embedded using sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2 — a local model, no API required.
2. Embeddings are stored as a numpy array in memory — no external vector store needed.
3. On each user message, the question is embedded and cosine similarity is computed directly against the full corpus to retrieve the most relevant passages.
4. The retrieved context is injected dynamically into the system prompt, so the model always answers grounded in the most relevant Stoic knowledge for that specific question.
5. Relevance is determined by cosine similarity — not a keyword list. A question like "how do I stop worrying about things I can't change?" matches Stoic content even without a single Stoic keyword.

The LLM itself is Llama 3.1 served via Groq — fast, free tier, and no OpenAI dependency.

The RAG index is built in a background thread when the app starts on the Home page, so by the time a user navigates to the chat, it is usually already ready.

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Project Structure

Stoic-App/
├── Home.py                         # Entry point — quote of the day + RAG preload
├── pages/
│   ├── 1_Stoic_Philosophers.py     # Philosopher profile cards
│   └── 2_Stoic_Chat.py             # AI chat interface
├── src/
│   ├── data/
│   │   ├── stoic_quotes.py         # Quote dataset (102 quotes, 13 philosophers)
│   │   └── stoic_figures.py        # Philosopher dataset (13 profiles)
│   ├── rag/
│   │   ├── __init__.py
│   │   └── retriever.py            # Corpus builder, ChromaDB index, query function
│   └── utils/
│       ├── helper.py               # Image loading & standardisation
│       └── styles.py               # Global CSS (Cinzel + Lora fonts)
├── assets/
│   └── images/                     # Philosopher portraits (public domain)
├── .streamlit/
│   ├── secrets.toml                # API keys — gitignored, never commit
│   └── secrets.toml.example        # Template for new contributors
└── requirements.txt

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Setup

1. Clone the repository

git clone <repository-url>
cd Stoic-App

2. Install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

Note: sentence-transformers pulls in PyTorch (~1.5 GB). The first install takes a few minutes. The embedding model itself (~80 MB) is downloaded automatically on first run.

3. Get a free Groq API key

Sign up at console.groq.com — it takes about two minutes and the free tier is generous.

4. Configure secrets

cp .streamlit/secrets.toml.example .streamlit/secrets.toml

Edit .streamlit/secrets.toml:

GROQ_API_KEY = "gsk_..."

5. Run the app

streamlit run Home.py

On first launch, the RAG index builds in the background (~5 seconds). Subsequent runs within the same session are instant.

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The Knowledge Base

The app includes a curated corpus of 102 quotes and 13 philosopher profiles spanning the full arc of Stoic history:

Era	Philosophers
Early Stoa (3rd–2nd c. BCE)	Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes, Chrysippus
Middle Stoa (2nd–1st c. BCE)	Panaetius, Posidonius, Hecaton of Rhodes
Roman Republic (1st c. BCE)	Cato the Younger
Roman Imperial (1st–2nd c. CE)	Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Hierocles
Modern (20th c.)	James Stockdale

Quotes cover a wide range of themes — death and impermanence, anger and conflict, friendship, grief, duty, wealth, learning, solitude, and the relationship between reason and nature — so the RAG system has genuine coverage regardless of what a user asks.

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Requirements

streamlit>=1.26.0
groq>=0.9.0
pillow>=10.0.0
requests>=2.31.0
python-dotenv>=1.0.0
numpy>=1.24.0
pandas>=2.0.0
toml>=0.10.2
sentence-transformers>=2.7.0