Epictetus — "Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it.…"
Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Live free and flourish.
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More from Epictetus
"Do not seek to have everything that happens happen as you wish, but choose to wish that everything that happens happen as it does, and your life will proceed smoothly."
"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."
"Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good."
"The reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is that we may listen the more and talk the less."
"Seek not to have things happen as you wish, but wish things to happen as they do, and you will have peace."
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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