Epictetus Quotes

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse

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

I must be exiled; but is there anything to keep me from going with a smile, calm and self-composed?

Your mind is complicit in the provocation.

Avoid Most Popular Entertainment Most of what passes for legitimate entertainment is inferior or foolish and only caters to or exploits people’s weaknesses. Avoid being one of the mob who indulges in such pastimes. Your life is too short and you have important things to do. Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mind. If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest. It is the easiest thing in the world to slide imperceptibly into vulgarity. But there’s no need for that to happen if you determine not to waste your time and attention on mindless pap.

Ask not that events should happen as you will, but let your will be that events should happen that you will have peace.

There is a time and place for diversion and amusements, but you should never allow them to override your true purposes.

Since it is Reason which shapes and regulates all other things, it ought not itself to be left in disorder.

that rational animals can hold off acting on impressions until they are scrutinized and assessed; and (2) if they are judged unreasonable – i.e. irrational or merely impractical – we can and should withhold our assent from them.

Before I became old I tried to live well; now that I am old, I shall try to die well; but dying well means dying gladly.

The crowd is of our own creation, you’re treading on your own toes. if you don't want to be crowded, don't attend the theater.

Give me by all means the shorter and nobler life, instead of one
that is longer but of less account!

If you would be a good reader, read; if a writer, write.

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.

Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of men's desires, but by the removal of desire.