Epictetus — "The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls…"
The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.
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More from Epictetus
"Good and evil, per Epictetus, lie only in the will."
"If a man has a bad character, he is bad for himself; if he has a good character, he is good for himself."
"A man is not hurt by what happens to him, but by his opinion of what happens to him."
"You are a little soul carrying around a corpse."
"Every difficulty in life presents us with an opportunity to turn inward and to invoke our own resources. The trials we endure can and should introduce us to our strengths."
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.