Discourses and Selected Writings (Classics)

by Epictetus

So, for instance, whenever I’m on board ship and gaze into the deep, or look around me and see nothing but ocean, I’m gripped by terror, imagining that if we wreck I will have to swallow all this sea. It doesn’t occur to me that around three pints will about do me in. So is it the sea that terrifies me? No, it is my imagination.

So what oppresses and scares us? It is our own thoughts, obviously. What overwhelms people when they are about to leave friends, family, old haunts and their accustomed way of life? Thoughts.

Every day you should put the ideas in action that protect against attachment to externals such as individual people, places or institutions – even your own body.

look to your own means, leave everything that isn’t yours alone. Make use of what material advantages you have, don’t regret the ones you were not allowed. If any of them are recalled, let go of them willingly, grateful for the time you had to enjoy them

Here is someone distraught because he will no longer drink of the water of Dirce.40 Is our water here in Rome inferior somehow? ‘No, but I had grown used to Dirce’s.’ [31] Well, you will get used to ours in time. And once you become used to it, the day may come when you pine for it in turn.

Don’t let the force of the impression when first it hits you knock you off your feet; just say to it, ‘Hold on a moment; let me see who you are and what you represent. Let me put you to the test.’ Next, don’t let it pull you in by picturing to yourself the pleasures that await you.

‘Make a bad beginning and you’ll contend with troubles ever after

you hear of people who are sincere in identifying virtue with choice and the use of impressions, don’t bother with whether they are members of the same family, or friends who’ve run together a long time; knowing this is enough to say with confidence that they are friends, just as it’s enough to judge them fair and reliable.

am I supposed to step aside and abandon my good just so you can have yours? Why? ‘Because I’m your father.’ But not the good. ‘I’m your brother.’ But not the good.

What, after all, are sighing and crying, except opinions? What is ‘misfortune’? An opinion. And sectarian strife, dissension, blame and accusation, ranting and raving – [19] they all are mere opinion, the opinion that good and bad lie outside us.

It is inevitable if you enter into relations with people on a regular basis, either for conversation, dining or simple friendship, that you will grow to be like them, unless you can get them to emulate you

‘What good will you get from death?’ ‘I will make it your glory, or the occasion for you to show how a person obeys the will of nature.’

who benefits society more, people who produce two or three brats with runny noses to survive them or those who supervise in each person’s life what they care about, or mistakenly neglect?

‘What I testify to, my body testifies to as well.’

First, tell yourself what you want to be, then act your part accordingly.

All our efforts must be directed towards an end, or we will act in vain. If it is not the right end, we will fail utterly.

Is your goal to educate or be praised? Right away the answer comes back, ‘What do I care for the praise of the vulgar masses?’ And those are fine words.

Listen to what Socrates says: ‘It would not suit me at my age, gentlemen, to come before you formulating phrases like a callow youth.’

acting against one’s will, under protest and compulsion, is tantamount to being a slave?

Weren’t you ever commanded by your sweetheart to do something you didn’t want to do? Did you never flatter your pet slave, and even kiss her feet? And yet if someone were to force you to kiss Caesar’s feet, you’d regard it as hubris and the height of tyranny. [18] If your lovesick condition isn’t slavery, then what is?

Diogenes says somewhere that one way to guarantee freedom is to be ready to die.

One thinks that he is unwell, when it’s nothing of the kind; the problem is that he is not adapting preconceptions correctly. One imagines that he is poor, another that he has a difficult mother or father, still another that Caesar is not disposed in his favour. This is all caused by one and the same thing, namely, ignorance of how to apply one’s preconceptions.

When everything you have has been given you, including your very existence, you proceed to turn on your benefactor and fault him for taking things back.

Make room for other people, it’s their turn to be born, just as you were born, and once born they need a place to live, along with the other necessities of life. If the first people won’t step aside, what’s going to happen? Don’t be so greedy. Aren’t you ever satisfied? Are you determined to make the world more crowded still?

the things that men admire and work so hard to get prove useless to them once they’re theirs. Meanwhile people to whom such things are still denied come to imagine that everything good will be theirs if only they could acquire them. Then they get them: and their longing is unchanged, their anxiety is unchanged, their disgust is no less, and they still long for whatever is lacking.

Freedom is not achieved by satisfying desire, but by eliminating it.

So choose: either regain the love of your old friends by reverting to your former self or remain better than you once were and forfeit their affection.

Just keep in mind: the more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.

Don’t grow peevish about trivialities. ‘The vinegar is bad, it’s sharp; the honey’s bad, it upsets my constitution; I didn’t like the vegetables.’

Which one of you does not admire what Lycurgus the Spartan2 said? He was blinded in one eye by a young citizen of Sparta, who was then handed over to Lycurgus to punish as he saw fit. Lycurgus not only declined to exact revenge, he gave the youth an education and made a good man of him. He then publicly introduced him at the theatre. The Spartans were indignant, but Lycurgus said, ‘The person you gave me was violent and aggressive; I’m returning him to you civilized and refined.’

Epictetus would also say that there were two vices much blacker and more serious than the rest: lack of persistence and lack of self-control.

‘Two words,’ he says, ‘should be committed to memory and obeyed by alternately exhorting and restraining ourselves, words that will ensure we lead a mainly blameless and untroubled life.’ These two words, he used to say, were ‘persist and resist’.

Archelaus8 invited Socrates to his court with the promise of wealth. But Socrates reported back that ‘In Athens four quarts of barley meal can be bought for a penny, and there are plenty of springs of fresh water. If my means are slight, still I can manage on them, which makes them adequate for my purposes.’

When we are guests at a dinner party, we content ourselves with the food on offer; if anyone were to tell the host to put out fish or cake, he would seem rude. In real life, however, we ask the gods for what they do not give, and this though they have provided us with plenty.

I live on and put up with washing, feeding and housing my miserable body. When I was younger it asked something else of me, and I put up with that too. So why can’t you tolerate it, when nature, which gave you this body, asks for it back? ‘But I love it.’ Wasn’t it nature, as I just finished saying, that made you love it? It’s nature, too, that tells you it’s time to let it go, so that you won’t have to fuss over it any more.

Don’t hope that events will turn out the way you want, welcome events in whichever way they happen: this is the path to peace.

It is better to die of hunger free of grief and apprehension than to live affluent and uneasy.

starting with things of little value – a bit of spilled oil, a little stolen wine – repeat to yourself: ‘For such a small price I buy tranquillity and peace of mind.’

And how can you be ‘a nobody in obscurity’ when you only have to be somebody in the areas you control

If your body was turned over to just anyone, you would doubtless take exception. Why aren’t you ashamed that you have made your mind vulnerable to anyone who happens to criticize you, so that it automatically becomes confused and upset?

reflect on both intervals of time: the time you will have to experience the pleasure, and the time after its enjoyment that you will beat yourself up over it.

It shows a lack of refinement to spend a lot of time exercising, eating, drinking, defecating or copulating. Tending to the body’s needs should be done incidentally, as it were; the mind and its functions require the bulk of our attention.

Whenever anyone criticizes or wrongs you, remember that they are only doing or saying what they think is right. They cannot be guided by your views, only their own;