Quotes from Epictetus

Restrict yourself to choice and refusal; and exercise them carefully, with discipline and detachment.

No one can steal your peace of mind unless you let them.

Freedom is not procured by a full enjoyment of what is desired, but by controlling the desire.

Reading should serve the goal of attaining peace; if it doesn't make you peaceful, what good is it?

What saith Antisthenes? Hast thou never heard?— It is a kingly thing, O Cyrus, to do well and to be evil spoken of.

He who exercises wisdom, exercises the knowledge which is about God.

It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.

Be happy when you find that doctrines you have learned and analysed are being tested by real events. If you've succeeded in removing or reducing the tendency to be mean and critical, or thoughtless, or foul-mouthed, or careless, or nonchalant; if old interests no longer engage you, at least not to the same extent; then every day can be a feast day – today because you acquitted yourself well in one set of circumstances, tomorrow because of another.

Is then the fruit of a fig-tree not perfect suddenly and in one hour, and would you possess the fruit of a man's mind in so short a time and so easily?

If you find yourself acting to impress others, or avoiding action out of fear of what they might think, you have left the path.

Be free from grief not through insensibility like the irrational animals, nor through want of thought like the foolish, but like a man of virtue by having reason as the consolation of grief.

Adopt new habits yourself: consolidate your principles by putting them into practice.

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

Those proficient praise no one, blame no one, and accuse no one. They say nothing concerning their self as being anybody or knowing anything.

We should realize that an opinion is not easily formed unless a person says and hears the same things every day and practises them in real life.

You will never have to experience defeat if you avoid contests whose outcome is outside your control.

Disease is an impediment to the body, but not to the will, unless the will itself chooses. Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will. And add this reflection on the occasion of everything that happens; for you will find it an impediment to something else, but not to yourself.

Demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.

The wise person knows it is fruitless to project hopes and fears on the future. This only leads to forming melodramatic representations in your mind and wasting time.

Isn't reading a kind of preparation for life?' But life is composed of things other than books. It is as if an athlete, on entering the stadium, were to complain that he's not outside exercising.This was the goal of your exercise, of your weights, your practice ring and your training partners.

Asked how a man should best grieve his enemy, Epictetus replied, By setting himself to live the noblest life himself.

Who, then, is the invincible human being? One who can be disconcerted by nothing that lies outside the sphere of choice.

What you shun enduring yourself, attempt not to impose on others. You shun slavery- beware enslaving others! If you can endure to do that, one would think you had been once upon a time a slave yourself. For vice has nothing in common with virtue, nor Freedom with slavery.

For in this Case, we are not to give Credit to the Many, who say, that none ought to be educated but the Free; but rather to the Philosophers, who say, that the Well-educated alone are free.