Epictetus Quotes
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Don't seek to have events happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do happen, and all will be well with you.
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At every occasion in your life, do not forget to commune with yourself and ask of yourself how you can profit by it.
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Give yourself fully to your endeavors. Decide to construct your character through excellent actions and determine to pay the price of a worthy goal. The trials you encounter will introduce you to your strengths.
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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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Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.
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Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.
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Nothing truly stops you. Nothing truly holds you back. For your own will is always within your control.
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It were no slight attainment could we merely fulfil what the nature of man implies.
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What will the world be quite overturned when you die?
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Against specious appearances we must set clear convictions, bright and ready for use. When death appears as an evil, we ought immediately to remember that evils are things to be avoided, but death is inevitable.
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Pain or pleasure? I say pleasure.
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Freedom and happiness are won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.
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Desire and happiness cannot live together.
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First tell yourself what you want to be, then do what you need to do.
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Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.
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A man that seeks truth and loves it must be reckoned precious to any human society.
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Try to enjoy the great festival of life with other men. (3).
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If a man has reported to you, that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make any defense (answer) to what has been told you: but reply, The man did not know the rest of my faults, for he would not have mentioned these only. (33) tr. George Long (1888).
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It has been ordained that there be summer and winter, abundance and dearth, virtue and vice, and all such opposites for the harmony of the whole, and (Zeus) has given each of us a body, property, and companions.
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When you do anything from a clear judgment that it ought to be done, never shun the being seen to do it, even though the world should make a wrong supposition about it; for, if you don't act right, shun the action itself; but, if you do, why are you afraid of those who censure you wrongly? (35).
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It is your own convictions which compels you; that is, choice compels choice.
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We are not to lead events, but to follow them.
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No living being is held by anything so strongly as its own needs.
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When men are unhappy, they do not imagine they can ever cease to be so; and when some calamity has fallen on them, they do not see how they can get rid of it. Nevertheless, both arrive; and the gods have ordered it so, in the end men seek it from the gods.