Discourses and Selected Writings (Classics)

by Epictetus

I must be put in chains – but moaning and groaning too? I must be exiled; but is there anything to keep me from going with a smile, calm and self-composed?

A student should practise how to expunge from his life sighs and sorrow, grief and disappointment, exclamations like ‘poor me’ and ‘alas’; [24] he should learn what death is, as well as exile, jail and hemlock, so at the end of the day he can say, like Socrates in prison, ‘Dear Crito, if it pleases the gods, so be it,’5 – instead of, ‘Poor me, an old man – is this what old age held in store for me?’

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

[23] You eagerly travel to Olympia to see the work of Phidias, and all of you account it a shame to die never having seen the sight.13 [24] But when there is no need even to travel, when you are already there∗ because Zeus is present everywhere in his works, don’t you want to look at and try to understand them? [25] Will you never come to a realization of who you are, what you have been born for and the purpose for which the gift of vision was made in our case?

It does matter where you are. Searching for peace in world is pointless since you should be searching inside yourself.

What would have become of Hercules, do you think, if there had been no lion, hydra, stag or boar – and no savage criminals to rid the world of? [33] What would he have done in the absence of such challenges? Obviously he would have just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep.

If he were anything more, he would realize that no one is ever unhappy because of someone else.