Epictetus — "Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you…"
Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.
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More from Epictetus
"If you would not be a man of many words, be a man of many deeds."
"It is better to starve than to eat meat offered to idols."
"You will be an admirable person, if you care for nothing but your own will."
"Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life."
"It is better to die of hunger, exempt from grief and fear, than to live in affluence with perturbation."
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.
Details
This sentiment is more prominently found in Marcus Aurelius's 'Meditations,' though the idea of living virtuously in the face of death is Stoic.
Date: c. 108 AD (approximate)
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