Epictetus Quotes
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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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To accuse others for one's own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one's education is complete.
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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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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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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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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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Your master is he who controls that on which you have set your heart or wish to avoid.
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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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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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When you are offended at any man's fault, turn to yourself and study your own failings. Then you will forget your anger.
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No living being is held by anything so strongly as its own needs.
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It is your own convictions which compels you; that is, choice compels choice.
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If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things. Don't wish to be thought to know anything; and even if you appear to be somebody important to others, distrust yourself. For, it is difficult to both keep your faculty of choice in a state conformable to nature, and at the same time acquire external things. But while you are careful about the one, you must of necessity neglect the other.
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If one oversteps the bounds of moderation, the greatest pleasures cease to please.
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We are not to lead events, but to follow them.
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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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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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With ills unending strives the putter off.
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What disturbs people, these are not things, but the judgments relating to things.
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If you think you control things that are in the control of others, you will lament. You will be disturbed and you will blame both gods and men.
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If what charms you is nothing but abstract principles, sit down and turn them over quietly in your mind: but never dub yourself a Philosopher.
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What will the world be quite overturned when you die?
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Never in any case say I have lost such a thing, but I have returned it. Is your child dead? It is a return. Is your wife dead? It is a return. Are you deprived of your estate? Is not this also a return?
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When we name things correctly, we comprehend them correctly, without adding information or judgements that aren't there. Does someone bathe quickly? Don't say be bathes poorly, but quickly. Name the situation as it is, don't filter it through your judgments. Give your assent only to that which is actually true.