If you seek truth you will not seek victory by dishonorable means, and if you find truth you will become invincible.
No greater thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then...
Who is your master? Whoever has authority over anything that you’re anxious to gain or avoid.
You should be especially careful when associating with one of your former friends or acquaintances not to sink to their level; otherwise you will lose yourself. If you are troubled by the idea that ‘H...
Never praise or blame people on common grounds; look to their judgements exclusively. Because that is the determining factor, which makes everyone's actions either good or bad.
Keep the prospect of death, exile and all such apparent tragedies before you every day – especially death – and you will never have an abject thought, or desire anything to excess.
Don't concern yourself with other people's business. It's his problem if he receives you badly. And you cannot suffer for another person's fault. So don't worry about the behavior of other.
Do not try to seem wise to others. If you want to live a wise life, live it on your own terms and in your own eyes.
Who are those people by whom you wish to be admired? Are they not these whom you are in the habit of saying that they are mad? What then? Do you wish to be admired by the mad?
How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you ha...
Those proficient praise no one, blame no one, and accuse no one. They say nothing concerning their self as being anybody or knowing anything.
Take care not to hurt the ruling faculty of your mind. If you were to guard against this in every action, you should enter upon those actions more safely.
So don't make a show of your philosophical learning to the uninitiated, show them by your actions what you have absorbed.
People with a strong physical constitution can tolerate extremes of hot and cold; people of strong mental health can handle anger, grief, joy and the other emotions.
Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.
It is better to do wrong seldom and to own it, and to act right for the most part, than seldom to admit that you have done wrong and to do wrong often.
It has been ordained that there be summer and winter, abundance and dearth, virtue and vice, and all such opposites for the harmony of the whole, and (Zeus) has given each of us a body, property, and...
In banquets remember that you entertain two guests, body and soul: and whatever you shall have given to the body you soon eject: but what you shall have given to the soul, you keep always.
Epictetus has had a long-standing resonance in the United States; his uncompromising moral rigour chimed in well with Protestant Christian beliefs and the ethical individualism that has been a persist...
We are not troubled by things but by the opinion which we have of things.