Epictetus Quotes
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Freedom and happiness come from understanding - and working with - our limits. Begin at once a program of self-mastery. Stick with your purpose. Do not seek external approval. Do not worry about anything outside of your control. The only things you command are your thoughts and actions. We choose our response. Stop aspiring to be anyone other than your own best self: for that does fall within your control.
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Whatever you would make habitual, practice it; and if you would not make a thing habitual, do not practice it, but accustom yourself to something else.
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Some things are up to us [eph' hêmin] and some things are not up to us. Our opinions are up to us, and our impulses, desires, aversions–in short, whatever is our own doing. Our bodies are not up to us, nor are our possessions, our reputations, or our public offices, or, that is, whatever is not our own doing.
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If you have assumed a character above your strength, you have both acted in this matter in an unbecoming way, and you have neglected that which you might have fulfilled.
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The appearance of things to the mind is the standard of every action to man.
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We must ever bear in mind --that apart from the will there is nothing good or bad, and that we must not try to anticipate or to direct events, but merely to accept them with intelligence.
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To get or not to get what we desire can be equally disappointing.
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You can be invincible, if you enter into no contest in which it is not in your power to conquer.
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'But to be hanged-is that not unendurable?' Even so, when a man feels that it is reasonable, he goes off and hangs himself.
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Difficulty shows what men are.
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The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.
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Every habit and faculty is preserved and increased by correspondent actions,-as the habit of walking, by walking; of running, by running.
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To a longer and worse life, a shorter and better is by all means to be preferred.
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You become what you give your attention to...If you yourself don't choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest.
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He who exercises wisdom exercises the knowledge which is about God.
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It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?
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No man is free who is not master of himself... Is freedom anything else than the power of living as we choose?
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A soul that makes virtue its companion is like an over-flowing well, for it is clean and pellucid, sweet and wholesome, open to all, rich, blameless and indestructible.
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Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.
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When the Idea, of any Pleasure strikes your Imagination... let that time be employed in making a just Computation between, the duration of the Pleasure, and that of the Repentance sure to follow it.
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In every affair consider what precedes and what follows, and then undertake it.
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Fight against yourself, recover yourself to decency, to modesty, to freedom. And, in the first place, condemn your actions; but when you have condemned them, do not despair of yourself. For both ruin and recovery are from within.
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If you wish to be a writer, write.
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Freedom is the name of virtue: Slavery, of vice…. None is a slave whose acts are free.