Quotes by Epictetus

Now is the time to get serious about living your ideals. How long can you afford to put off who you really want to be? Your nobler self cannot wait any longer. Put your principles into practice – now. Stop the excuses and the procrastination. This is your life! You aren’t a child anymore. The sooner you set yourself to your spiritual program, the happier you will be. The longer you wait, the more you’ll be vulnerable to mediocrity and feel filled with shame and regret, because you know you are capable of better. From this instant on, vow to stop disappointing yourself. Separate yourself from the mob. Decide to be extraordinary and do what you need to do – now.

Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.

Men are not afraid of things, but of how they view them.

Dont put your purpose in one place and expect to see progress made somewhere else.

Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of mens desires, but by the removal of desire.

What you shun enduring yourself, attempt not to impose on others. You shun slavery- beware enslaving others! If you can endure to do that, one would think you had been once upon a time a slave yourself. For vice has nothing in common with virtue, nor Freedom with slavery.

Freedom is not archived by satisfying desire, but by eliminating it.

Freedom, you see, is having events go in accordance with our will, never contrary to it.

Man, what are you talking about? Me in chains? You may fetter my leg but my will, not even Zeus himself can overpower.

In the long run, every man will pay the penalty for his own misdeeds. The man who remembers this will be angry with no one, indignant with no one, revile no one, blame no one, offend no one, hate no one.

So what oppresses and scares us? It is our own thoughts, obviously, What overwhelms people when they are about to leaves friends, family, old haunts and their accustomed way of life? Thoughts.

When you do anything from a clear judgment that it ought to be done, never shrink from being seen to do it, even though the world should misunderstand it; for if you are not acting rightly, shun the action itself; if you are, why fear those who wrongly censure you?

Very little is needed for everything to be upset and ruined, only a slight lapse in reason.

And where there is ignorance, there is also want of learning and instruction in essentials.

If you have assumed any character beyond your strength, you have both demeaned yourself ill in that and quitted one which you might have supported.

It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.

It is not so much what happens to you as how you think about what happens. Epictetus

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 have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy, but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress, but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary. From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. That is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet a Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be a Socrates.

Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems

You know yourself what you are worth in your own eyes; and at what price you will sell yourself. For men sell themselves at various prices. This is why, when Florus was deliberating whether he should appear at Neros shows, taking part in the performance himself, Agrippinus replied, Appear by all means. And when Florus inquired, But why do not you appear? he answered, Because I do not even consider the question. For the man who has once stooped to consider such questions, and to reckon up the value of external things, is not far from forgetting what manner of man he is.