Quotes from Epictetus
Covetousness like jealousy, when it has taken root, never leaves a person, but with their life. Cowardice is the dread of what will happen.
- Epictetus
To live a life of virtue, match up your thoughts, words, and deeds.
- Epictetus
There is only one thing for which God has sent me into the world, and that is to develop every kind of virtue or strength, and there is nothing in all the world that I cannot use for this purpose.
- Epictetus
I must die. Must I then die lamenting? I must be put in chains. Must I then also lament? I must go into exile. Does any man then hinder me from going with smiles and cheerfulness and contentment?
- Epictetus
Freedom is the right to live as we wish.
- Epictetus
Difficulties are things that show a person what they are.
- Epictetus
One that desires to excel should endeavor in those things that are in themselves most excellent.
- Epictetus
When the Idea, of any Pleasure strikes your Imagination... let that time be employed in making a just Computation between, the duration of the Pleasure, and that of the Repentance sure to follow it.
- Epictetus
To a longer and worse life, a shorter and better is by all means to be preferred.
- Epictetus
It is difficulties that show what men are.
- Epictetus
If virtue promises happiness, prosperity and peace, then progress in virtue is progress in each of these for to whatever point the perfection of anything brings us, progress is always an approach toward it.
- Epictetus
Ruin and recovery are both from within.
- Epictetus