Quotes from Epictetus

Other people's views and troubles can be contagious. Don't sabotage yourself by unwittingly adopting negative, unproductive attitudes through your associations with others.

Do not seek to bring things to pass in accordance with your wishes, but wish for them as they are, and you will find them.

The best place to get help is from yourself.

If anyone is unhappy, remember that his unhappiness is his own fault... Nothing else is the cause of anxiety or loss of tranquility except our own opinion.

It is my business, to manage carefully and dexterously whatever happens

If you seek truth you will not seek victory by dishonorable means, and if you find truth you will become invincible.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

It is better to live with one free man and to be without fear and free, than to be a slave with many.

Confidence in nonsense is a requirement for the creative process.

So when the crisis is upon you remember that God like a trainer of wrestlers has matched you with a tough and stalwart antagonist... that you may prove a victor at the Great Games.

Let death and exile, and all other things which appear terrible be daily before your eyes, but chiefly death, and you win never entertain any abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything.

In a word, neither death, nor exile, nor pain, nor anything of this kind is the real cause of our doing or not doing any action, but our inward opinions and principles.

What is death? A scary mask. Take it off-see, it doesn't bite.

To get or not to get what we desire can be equally disappointing.

Desire and happiness cannot live together.

Only the educated are free.

Any person capable of angering you becomes your master.

Don't be prideful with any excellence that is not your own

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

We must be afraid of neither poverty nor exile nor imprisonment; of fear itself only should we be afraid.

It is better to die of hunger having lived without grief and fear, than to live with a troubled spirit, amid abundance

Why, do you not know, then, that the origin of all human evils, and of baseness, and cowardice, is not death, but rather the fear of death?

No man is free who is not master of himself.

Preach not to others what they should eat, but eat as becomes you and be silent.