Epictetus — "What would it be like to be a sheep? To have no reason, no sense of shame, to be…"
What would it be like to be a sheep? To have no reason, no sense of shame, to be driven by instinct alone? It would be terrible, wouldn't it?
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More from Epictetus
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things."
"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."
"If you are grieved about anything external, it is not the thing itself that troubles you, but your judgment about it. And it is in your power to wipe out this judgment at any moment."
"The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests."
"It is not poverty that is feared, but the opinion about poverty."
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.