Epictetus — "Freedom isn't secured by filling up on your heart's desire but by removing your …"
Freedom isn't secured by filling up on your heart's desire but by removing your desire.
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More from Epictetus
"If you want to be rich, do not heap up riches, but diminish your desires."
"When you are going to meet with any person, and particularly one of those who are considered to be great, represent to yourself what Socrates or Zeno would have done in such a case, and you will not b…"
"If a man is unhappy, this must be due to his own fault, that he does not understand that it is in his power to be happy."
"If you have a mind to be a philosopher, prepare yourself from the first to be laughed at, to be sneered at by the multitude."
"If you always remember that God stands by you, and inspects your acts, whether in soul or body, you will not err either in your prayers or in your acts."
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.