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
"Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that are not within our control."
"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live."
"Some things are in our control and others are not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, prope…"
"To say that 'I will do it tomorrow' is to say that 'I will not do it at all.'"
"What would it be like to be a donkey? To be driven by a stick, to carry burdens, to have no choice? It would be a simple life, wouldn't it?"
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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