Epictetus Quotes
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Keep silence for the most part, and speak only when you must, and then briefly.
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Remember that you are an actor in a play, and that the Playwright chooses the manner of it: If he wants you to act a poor man you must act the part with all your powers; and so if your part be a cripple or a magistrate or a plain man. For your business is to act the character that is given you and act it well. The choice of the cast is Another's.
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Exceed due measure, and the most delightful things become the least delightful.
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By accepting life's limits and inevitabilities and working with them rather than fighting them, we become free.
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Renew every day your conversation with God: Do this even in preference to eating. Think more often of God than you breathe.
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Whoever does not regard what he has as most ample wealth, is unhappy, though he be master of the world.
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Embrace reality. Think about what delights you - the small luxuries on which you depend, the people whom you cherish most. But remember that they have their own distinct character, which is quite a separate matter from how we happen to regard them.
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I am always content with what happens; for I know that what God chooses is better than what I choose.
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It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself. (5) tr. George Long (1888).
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The universe is but one great city, full of beloved ones, divine and human, by nature endeared to each other.
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Everything has two handles,-one by which it may be borne; another by which it cannot.
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Choose the life that is noblest, for custom can make it sweet to thee.
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Covetousness like jealousy, when it has taken root, never leaves a person, but with their life. Cowardice is the dread of what will happen.
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Since it is Reason which shapes and regulates all other things, it ought not itself to be left in disorder.
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We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.
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To the rational being only the irrational is unendurable, but the rational is endurable.
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Know you not that a good man does nothing for appearance sake, but for the sake of having done right?
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In a word, neither death, nor exile, nor pain, nor anything of this kind is the real cause of our doing or not doing any action, but our inward opinions and principles.
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If someone irritates you, it is only your own response that is irritating you. Therefore, when anyone seems to be provoking you, remember that it is only your judgment of the incident that provokes you.
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This whole world is one great City, and one is the substance whereof it is fashioned: a certain period indeed there needs must be, while these give place to those; some must perish for others to succeed; some move and some abide: yet all is full of friends-first God, then Men, whom Nature hath bound by ties of kindred each to each. (123).
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Man is troubled not by events, but by the meaning he gives them.
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It is better to advise than upbraid, for the one corrects the erring; the other only convicts them.
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What thou avoidest suffering thyself seek not to impose on others.
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It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.