Quotes About Ethics

Do not afflict others with anything that you yourself would not wish to suffer. if you would not like to be a slave, make sure no one is your slave. If you have slaves, you yourself are the greatest slave, for just as freedom is incompatible with slavery, so goodness is incompatible with hypocrisy.

A city is not adorned by external things, but by the virtue of those who dwell in it.

It is a universal law — have no illusion — that every creature alive is attached to nothing so much as to its own self-interest.

Never say that I have taken it, only that I have given it back.

Crows pick out the eyes of the dead, when the dead have no longer need of them; but flatterers mar the soul of the living, and her eyes they blind.

So don't make a show of your philosophical learning to the uninitiated, show them by your actions what you have absorbed.

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

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

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

It is always our choice whether or not we wish to pay the price for life's rewards. And often it is best for us not to pay the price, for the price might be our integrity.

Conduct yourself in all matters, grand and public or small and domestic, in accordance with the laws of nature. Harmonizing your will with nature should be your utmost ideal.

When then any man assents to that which is false, be assured that he did not intend to assent to it as false, for every soul is unwillingly deprived of the truth, as Plato says; but the falsity seemed to him to be true.

Let whatever appears to be the best be to you an inviolable law. And if any instance of pain or pleasure, glory or disgrace, be set before you, remember that now is the combat, now the Olympiad comes on, nor can it be put off; and that by one failure and defeat honor may be lost or—won.

Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.

Whatever moral rules you have deliberately proposed to yourself. abide by them as they were laws, and as if you would be guilty of impiety by violating any of them. Don't regard what anyone says of you, for this, after all, is no concern of yours.

If what philosophers say of the kinship of God and Man be true, what remains for men to do but as Socrates did:—never, when asked one's country, to answer, I am an Athenian or a Corinthian, but I am a citizen of the world.

It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them.

the good of man, and likewise his ill, lies in how he exercises his choice, while everything else is nothing to us

Follow your principles as though they were laws. Do not worry if others criticize or laugh at you, for their opinions are not your concern.

Let death and exile and every other thing which appears dreadful be daily before your eyes; but most of all death: and you will never think of anything mean nor will you desire anything extravagantly.

You're not yet Socrates, but you can still live as if you want to be him.

We must consider what is the time for singing, what the time for play, and in whose presence: what will be unsuited to the occasion; whether our companions are to despise us, or we to despise ourselves: when to jest, and whom to mock at: and on what occasion to be conciliatory and to whom: in a word, how one ought to maintain one's character in society. Wherever you swerve from any of these principles, you suffer loss at once; not loss from without, but issuing from the very act itself.

Your aim should be to view the world as an integrated whole, to faithfully incline your whole being toward the highest good, and to adopt the will of nature as your own.

Taking account of the value of externals, you see, comes at some cost to the value of one's own character.