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Some things are up to us and some are not up to us. Our opinions are up to us, and our impulses, desires, aversions—in short, whatever is our own doing. Our bodies are not up to us, nor are our possessions, our reputations, or our public offices, or, that is, whatever is not our own doing. The things that are up to us are by nature free, unhindered, and unimpeded; the things that are not up to us are weak, enslaved, hindered, not our own.
since if you desire something that is not up to us, you are bound to be unfortunate,
What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about the things. For example, death is nothing dreadful (or else it would have appeared dreadful to Socrates), but instead the judgment about death that it is dreadful—that is what is dreadful. So when we are thwarted or upset or distressed, let us never blame someone else but rather ourselves, that is, our own judgments. An uneducated person accuses others when he is doing badly; a partly educated person accuses himself, an educated person accuses neither someone else nor himself.
Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.
Never say about anything, “I have lost it,” but instead, “I have given it back.”
It is better to die of hunger with distress and fear gone than to live upset in the midst of plenty.
What is yours is to play the assigned part well. But to choose it belongs to someone else.
You can be invincible if you do not enter any contest in which victory is not up to you.
Remember that what is insulting is not the person who abuses you or hits you, but the judgment about them that they are insulting. So when someone irritates you be aware that what irritates you is your own belief.
Most importantly, therefore, try not to be carried away by appearance, since if you once gain time and delay you will control yourself more easily.
Let death and exile and everything that is terrible appear before your eyes every day, especially death; and you will never have anything contemptible in your thoughts or crave anything excessively.
If it ever happens that you turn outward to want to please another person, certainly you have lost your plan of life.
Set up right now a certain character and pattern for yourself which you will preserve when you are by yourself and when you are with people.
