Epictetus Quotes
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If you do not wish to be prone to anger, do not feed the habit; give it nothing which may tend to its increase.
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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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Freedom isn't the right or ability to do whatever you please. Freedom comes from understanding the limits of our own power and the inherent limits set in place by nature. By accepting life's limits and inevitabilities and working with them rather than fighting them, you become truly free.
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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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We all dread a bodily paralysis, and would make use of every contrivance to avoid it; but none of us is troubled about a paralysis of the soul.
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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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Why, do you not know, then, that the origin of all human evils, and of baseness, and cowardice, is not death, but rather the fear of death?
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It is not he who gives abuse that affronts, but the view that we take of it as insulting; so that when one provokes you it is your own opinion which is provoking.
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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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Difficulty shows what men are.
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Be not diverted from your duty by any idle reflections the silly world may make upon you, for their censures are not in your power and should not be at all your concerns.
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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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When we are invited to a banquet, we take what is set before us; and were one to call upon his host to set fish upon the table or sweet things, he would be deemed absurd. Yet in a word, we ask the Gods for what they do not give; and that, although they have given us so many things! (35).
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Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.
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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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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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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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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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Once you know who you are and to whom you are linked, you will know what to do.
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To get or not to get what we desire can be equally disappointing.
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Only the educated are free.
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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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God has entrusted me with myself.
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Try not to react merely in the moment. Pull back from the situation. Take a wider view. Compose yourself.