Epictetus — "You will be an admirable person, if you care for nothing but your own will."
You will be an admirable person, if you care for nothing but your own will.
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More from Epictetus
"Seek not to have things happen as you wish, but wish things to happen as they do, and you will have peace."
"Other people's views and troubles can be contagious. Don't sabotage yourself by unwittingly adopting negative, unproductive attitudes through your associations with others."
"He who is not a good servant will not be a good master."
"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."
"To be happy is to desire nothing, since a man who desires something is not happy, but rather miserable, if he does not get what he desires."
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.