Epictetus Quotes
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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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Upon all occasions we ought to have these maxims ready at hand:
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He who is not happy with little will never be happy with much.
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We are not to give credit to the many, who say that none ought to be educated but the free; but rather to the philosophers, who say that the well-educated alone are free.
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We should do everything both cautiously and confidently at the same time.
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If you wish to be a writer, write.
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Opportunity beckons more surely when misfortune comes upon a person than it ever does when that person is riding the crest of a wave of success. It sharpens a person's wits, if that person will let it, enabling him or her to see more clearly and evaluate situations with a more knowledgeable judgment.
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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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Only the educated are free.
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We must be afraid of neither poverty nor exile nor imprisonment; of fear itself only should we be afraid.
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Try not to react merely in the moment. Pull back from the situation. Take a wider view. Compose yourself.
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Each man's life is a kind of campaign, and a long and complicated one at that. You have to maintain the character of a soldier, and do each separate act at the bidding of the General.
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What disturbs people's minds are not events but their judgments on events.
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The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows where he is going.
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God has made all men to be happy.
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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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Freedom is the name of virtue: Slavery, of vice…. None is a slave whose acts are free.
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Authentic happiness is always independent of external conditions.
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Who is not attracted by bright and pleasant children, to prattle, to creep, and to play with them?
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Unless we place our religion and our treasure in the same thing, religion will always be sacrificed.
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It is more necessary for the soul to be cured than the body; for it is better to die than to live badly.
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Living a good life leads to enduring happiness. Goodness in and of itself is the practice AND the reward.
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It is a mark of a mean capacity to spend much time on the things which concern the body, such as much exercise, much eating, much drinking, much easing of the body, much copulation. But these things should be done as subordinate things: and let all your care be directed to the mind.
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It is no easy thing for a principle to become a man's own unless each day he maintains it and works it out in his life.