Epictetus — "If a man is unhappy, this must be due to his own fault, that he has forgotten th…"
If a man is unhappy, this must be due to his own fault, that he has forgotten that all things are in his own power.
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More from Epictetus
"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…"
"If you want to be rich, do not add to your possessions but subtract from your desires."
"To be happy is to desire nothing, since a man who desires something is not happy, but rather miserable, if he does not get what he desires."
"There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will."
"Good and evil, in his view, come only from those things that progress from our will."
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.