Epictetus Quotes
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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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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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Learn to distinguish what you can and can't control. Within our control are our own opinions, aspirations, desires and the things that repel us. They are directly subject to our influence.
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Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.
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Attach yourself to what is spiritually superior, regardless of what other people think or do. Hold to your true aspirations no matter what is going on around you.
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Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.
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It is your own convictions which compels you; that is, choice compels choice.
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Your master is he who controls that on which you have set your heart or wish to avoid.
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A man that seeks truth and loves it must be reckoned precious to any human society.
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Yet God hath not only granted these faculties, by which we may bear every event without being depressed or broken by it, but like a good prince and a true father, hath placed their exercise above restraint, compulsion, or hindrance, and wholly without our own control.
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Pain or pleasure? I say pleasure.
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Caretake this moment. Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed. Quit evasions. Stop giving yourself needless trouble. It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now.
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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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Neither the victories of the Olympic Games nor those achieved in battles make the man happy. The only victories that make him happy are those achieved against himself. Temptations and tests are combats. You have beaten one, two, many times; still fight. If you defeat at last you will be happy your entire life, as if you have always defeated.
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It's so simple really: If you say you're going to do something, do it. If you start something, finish it.
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Survey and test a prospective action before undertaking it. Before you proceed, step back and look at the big picture, lest you act rashly on raw impulse.
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If you seek truth you will not seek victory by dishonorable means, and if you find truth you will become invincible.
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It is not my place in society that makes me well off, but my judgements, and these I can carry with me... These alone are my own and cannot be taken away.
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Wisdom means understanding without any doubt that circumstances do not rise to meet our expectations. Events happen as they may. People behave as they will.
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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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No living being is held by anything so strongly as its own needs.
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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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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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Be free from grief not through insensibility like the irrational animals, nor through want of thought like the foolish, but like a man of virtue by having reason as the consolation of grief.