Epictetus — "Small-minded people are fond of saying, 'By Zeus, I wish I were not a philosophe…"
Small-minded people are fond of saying, 'By Zeus, I wish I were not a philosopher!'
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More from Epictetus
"Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well."
"If you are going to write, be content to be unlearned. If you are going to wrestle, be content to be beaten. For if you are not content with these things, you will not write, nor will you wrestle."
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things."
"Do not be concerned with what people think of you. You are not living for them."
"Every man's life is a warfare, and that long and various."
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.