Epictetus — "If you are kissed by a beautiful woman, or boy, do not say, 'I am fortunate,' bu…"
If you are kissed by a beautiful woman, or boy, do not say, 'I am fortunate,' but 'I have been kissed by a beautiful woman.'
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More from Epictetus
"As a man, you are a fragment of God; you have within you a part of Him. Why then are you ignorant of your own kinship, or do you not know whence you came?"
"An uninstructed person will lay the fault of his own bad condition upon others. To begin to be instructed, he will lay the fault on himself. When he is fully instructed, he will blame neither others n…"
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About Epictetus (c. 50-135 CE)
Greek Stoic philosopher and former slave whose Discourses (recorded by his student Arrian) shaped Marcus Aurelius and the modern Stoic revival. Closely associated with Seneca (earlier Roman Stoic) and Marcus Aurelius (his student-by-text on the imperial throne). For an intellectual contrast, see Epicurus, Greek philosopher of pleasure-as-tranquility — the Stoic-Epicurean rivalry was the central philosophical debate of the Hellenistic and Roman world for 400 years — Epicurean materialist hedonism is the precise alternative the Stoic discipline-of-acceptance was built against.
The standard scholarly entry points to Epictetus's work: A.A. Long (UC Berkeley, Classics) — Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (2002); Pierre Hadot (Collège de France) — Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995); Anthony R. Birley (Manchester, Roman historian) — Marcus Aurelius (1987) — the standard biography of Epictetus's most famous student. These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Epictetus.