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… - Epictetus

Whenever you see someone holding political power, set against it the fact that you yourself have no need of power. Whenever you see someone wealthy, observe what you have instead of that. For if you have nothing in its place, you are in a miserable state; but if you have the absence of the need to have wealth, realize that you have something greater and much more valuable. One man has a beautiful wife, you have the absence of longing for a beautiful wife. Do you think these are little things? How much would these very people – the wealthy, the powerful, the ones who live with beautiful women – pay for the ability to look down on wealth and power and those very women whom they adore and get?

When you see a person weeping in sorrow either when a. child goes abroad or when he is dead, or when the man has lost his property, take care that the appearance do not hurry you away with it, as if he were suffering in external things. But straightway make a distinction in your own mind, and be in readiness to say, it is not that which has happened that afflicts this man, for it does not afflict another, but it is the opinion about this thing which afflicts the man. So far as words then do not be unwilling to show him sympathy, and even if it happens so, to lament with him. But take care that you do not. lament internally also.

Curb your desire—don’t set your heart on so many things and you will get what you need.