Discourses and Selected Writings (Classics)

by Epictetus

education has no goal more important than bringing our preconception of what is reasonable and unreasonable in alignment with nature.

Epictetus will not be better than Socrates. But if I am no worse, I am satisfied. [37] I mean, I will never be Milo either; nevertheless, I don’t neglect my body. Nor will I be another Croesus – and still, I don’t neglect my property. In short, we do not abandon any discipline for despair of ever being the best in it.

For wherever the perfection of anything tends, progress is always an approach towards the same thing.

Look for it in your volition, friend – that is, in your desire and avoidance. Make it your goal never to fail in your desires or experience things you would rather avoid; try never to err in impulse and repulsion; aim to be perfect also in the practice of attention and withholding judgement.

how have you made progress? [13] So let’s see some evidence of it. But no, it’s as if I were to say to an athlete, ‘Show me your shoulders,’ and he responded with, ‘Have a look at my weights.’ ‘Get out of here with you and your gigantic weights!’ I’d say, ‘What I want to see isn’t the weights but how you’ve profited from using them.’

For what else are tragedies but the ordeals of people who have come to value externals, tricked out in tragic verse?

Now, a person can suffer two kinds of petrifaction,9 that of the intellect, and that of the sense of honour, when somebody assumes a defiant stance, resolved neither to assent to self-evident truths nor leave off fighting.

It is easy to praise providence for everything that happens in the world provided you have both the ability to see individual events in the context of the whole and a sense of gratitude.