Epictetus — "If you want to be rich, do not add to your possessions but subtract from your de…"
If you want to be rich, do not add to your possessions but subtract from your desires.
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More from Epictetus
"If a man has a bad smell, he knows it not, but his neighbor knows it. So too with our faults."
"Every difficulty in life presents us with an opportunity to turn inward and to invoke our own resources. The challenges to our spirit are not to be avoided, but embraced."
"It is not poverty that is feared, but the opinion about poverty."
"When you have decided that you are going to take a bath, be careful how you act, and don't make a scene."
"It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them."
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.
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