Epictetus — "If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard …"
If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things.
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More from Epictetus
"What would you rather have? A beautiful garden, or a good one? A beautiful garden is one that is good; a good garden is not necessarily beautiful."
"The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best."
"Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants."
"If you see anybody wail and complain, call him a slave, though he be clad in purple."
"The essence of philosophy is to put up with things."
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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