Epictetus quotes, with their sources

Every passage below is an exact excerpt from George Long’s translation, checked word for word against the digitized text; an ellipsis (…) marks words left out. Three habits of Long’s Victorian English are worth knowing first. He uses will for prohairesis, Epictetus’s word for our faculty of choice, which is not the same thing as willpower (more on prohairesis). His appearances are impressions: the way a thing strikes you before you have decided what it means. And words in parentheses are Long’s own alternative renderings, not additions of ours.

The two lines everyone quotes

Most lists of Epictetus quotes begin with these two, and each has a fuller page of its own here.

The example carries as much weight as the rule. If death were terrible in itself, Socrates would have found it so, and he didn’t; the terrible thing is “the opinion about death that it is terrible” (Enchiridion 5). The chapter goes on to say whom to blame when you are upset; our reading of Enchiridion 5 covers that half too.

Every later chapter of the handbook leans on this division. The first list is short: opinion, desire, aversion, “whatever are our acts.” The second holds most of what people spend their lives chasing, from health and money to reputation and rank. Its modern name is the dichotomy of control, and its page has a free exercise built on it.

What is yours: judgments and appearances

Most of Epictetus comes back to one line between what belongs to you and what doesn’t. These three passages draw it in different places.

The target is pride borrowed from things. A talking horse might be forgiven for boasting about its looks; the owner who boasts is taking credit for the horse. Today it is the car in the driveway, the employer’s name on the lanyard, a child’s test scores. What Epictetus lets you be proud of is narrower: the use you make of how things appear to you. Judge well, and then “be elated,” because that good really is “your own” (Enchiridion 6).

Many of Epictetus’s contemporaries took a croaking raven as a bad sign. The modern raven is a calendar invite titled “Quick chat” or a headline about layoffs in your industry. Sort before you react, he says: whatever the sign points to, it can only concern your body, property, reputation or family, never the part of you that chooses. Then comes his boldest claim: whatever happens, “it is in my power to derive benefit from it” (Enchiridion 18). That is about what you can make of an outcome, not a promise of a good one.

The man in this discourse was traveling to Rome over a lawsuit about his rank. Epictetus has “no rule” for forecasting the verdict. What he can forecast is whether the man fares well or ill, because that turns on his own opinions. Then the sting: people cross the sea for a governorship on Crete but never travel to examine what they believe. Swap in a regional director job and a red-eye flight, and the question stands.

Starting small, growing slowly

Epictetus expected improvement to come slowly, and he told students to practice first where the stakes are lowest.

The first thought he tells you to throw away still sounds familiar: if I stop fretting over my affairs, I won’t have enough to live on. Start instead, he says, with small things. Spilled oil and stolen wine were the household annoyances of his day; ours are coffee on the keyboard or a package taken from the porch. Each is a chance to name the trade out loud. A little wine is what tranquility costs today, and “nothing is got for nothing” (Enchiridion 12).

The occasion was a man whose brother was angry with him and who wanted advice on winning him over. Philosophy promises no “external thing,” he says, and the brother’s anger belongs to the brother. What philosophy can work on is the man’s own mind, which ripens on a fig tree’s schedule: flower, fruit, ripening. Anyone who has read one Stoic book and expected to be calm by Friday has asked for the fig in an hour.

Disagreement and criticism

Epictetus taught by argument, and he had firm views on how to argue and how to take criticism.

Philosophy, on this account, begins with something everyone has noticed: people disagree, often about words they all use with confidence, such as good and just. The beginner asks why, and stops trusting how things merely seem. Epictetus wants a standard, as we have scales for weights and a carpenter has a square. His conclusion is the opposite of “everyone has their own truth”: what seems right to each person is “not sufficient for determining” what is (Discourses 2.11).

A guide who finds someone lost doesn’t mock them; he walks them back to the road. If the other person doesn’t follow your argument, Epictetus suggests you haven’t actually shown them the truth yet, so “feel your own incapacity” (Discourses 2.12). Then he offers Socrates as the model, a man who never let himself get irritated in an argument. Hold that up against the last comment thread you joined.

This is Epictetus at his driest. A coworker passes on what someone said about you in a meeting, and the reflex is to send a defense back up the chain. Epictetus suggests agreeing, and adding that the critic missed a few. The reply takes the sting out, keeps you out of a secondhand quarrel, and is simply true. The version usually shared, about the critic being ignorant of your other faults, comes from another translation; Long’s says “The man did not know the rest of my faults” (Enchiridion 33).

Being your own company

Two discourses from Book 3 make one point: the trouble is not being alone but being unable to be alone. Discourses 3.13 opens with a distinction: being alone is not the same as being solitary, which in Long’s rendering means being helpless. You can be alone and well, or solitary in a crowded city after losing a brother or a friend.

Epictetus calls the wish for company natural. His point is that you should also be ready for its absence: a weekend with no plans, the first months in a new city. Zeus is his model of a mind at ease with itself, and children are a humbler one. Left alone with shells and ashes, they build something, knock it down and build again, and “never want the means of passing the time” (Discourses 3.13).

A bad actor can only sing as part of the chorus. Epictetus’s instruction is short: walk alone, talk to yourself, don’t hide in the crowd. Today the chorus is portable: the podcast that starts as you leave the house, the phone you reach for in every checkout line. The test is whether you can manage ten minutes without them, for the reason he gives: “that you may know who you are” (Discourses 3.14).

Freedom

Epictetus had been enslaved himself, and freedom is one of his constant subjects, though never mainly as a legal status.

The many, and the lawmakers with them, hold that only free people should be educated; philosophers hold that only the educated are free. He goes on to mock the ceremony by which a Roman master freed a slave before a magistrate, and asks whether that master has no master himself: money, a lover, a tyrant. The freedom he means is “release from perturbation, release from fear.” The short form that circulates, “Only the educated are free,” is fair to him; Long has “the educated only are free” (Discourses 2.1).

Freedom is not getting everything you want; Epictetus calls wanting that madness. His comparison is spelling. You aren’t free to spell a name like Dion however you like, and learning to write means learning to want it written correctly. Freedom works the same way. To be properly taught is “to learn to wish that everything may happen as it does” (Discourses 1.12). Nietzsche’s much later name for this attitude is amor fati; our guide to amor fati traces its Stoic sources.

Death

Epictetus speaks about death plainly and often, mostly to take the fear out of it. Enchiridion 5, at the top of this page, is one example; here are two more.

He doesn’t promise that thinking about death will make you brave. He promises something smaller and easier to check: you will stop thinking of “anything mean” and stop wanting things “extravagantly” (Enchiridion 21). A grudge over a parking space looks different beside the fact that time is limited. The habit now goes by a later Latin label, memento mori.

Epictetus is building on a saying of Chrysippus, whom he quotes just before this excerpt, and the argument is from nature. Grain is grown to be harvested, and a stalk never reaped would have missed the point of growing; a human life, on this view, is the same kind of thing. Our resentment comes from not having studied “what belongs to man,” as horse trainers study horses (Discourses 2.6). The argument presents death as part of a life rather than an interruption of one.

For Epictetus on the fear of death, see what the Stoics said about fear; for Marcus and Seneca, Stoic quotes on death.

Popular Epictetus quotes, traced

Quote sites credit Epictetus with four kinds of line: his words in someone else’s translation, modern restatements of his ideas, sayings from fragments of uncertain authorship, and sentences nobody has found in him at all. We checked the most common against Long’s translation, including chapters and fragments outside the selection we quote.

“It’s not what happens to you…” keeps the direction of Enchiridion 5 but swaps his opinion for reaction, which changes more than it seems to. Our page on Enchiridion 5 explains what is lost.

“Make the best use of what is in your power…” is a fair modern rewording of a sentence in Discourses 1.1. Long’s version is in a part of the chapter the selection we quote leaves out, so we can’t show it here. It is the practical half of Enchiridion 1: do your best with what is up to you, and take the rest as it comes.

“No man is free who is not master of himself” appears, in exactly those words, as Fragment 114 of the fragments at the end of Long’s translation. The fragments are short sayings that later anthologies attributed to Epictetus, less secure than the two main books; Long warned that some in the edition he worked from are not his at all. This one fits his teaching, and Discourses 2.1 makes a related argument at length.

“First say to yourself what you would be…” is genuine. It opens Discourses 3.23, a chapter aimed at people who read and lecture for show; it isn’t in the selection we quote, and Long’s wording differs a little. The point is order: decide who you are trying to be, and let that settle what you do.

“Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it” isn’t a translation of anything. It compresses Enchiridion 46, where Epictetus tells students not to call themselves philosophers or lecture people on principles, but to act on them. It also loses his best image: sheep don’t bring up their grass to show the shepherd how much they ate; they digest it and give wool and milk.

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants” isn’t in Long’s Enchiridion, in the Discourses we can search or among his fragments, though the thought is close to Epictetus. Enchiridion 39 makes the body the measure of what you need, the way a foot sets the size of a shoe, and one of the fragments says it is desire, not poverty, that brings sorrow. Until someone gives a reference, call the line unsourced.

“He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at” has no source we can find in Epictetus. What he does say about laughter, in Enchiridion 33, is that it should be rare and never excessive, which makes this an odd line to hang on him.

“He who angers you conquers you” is not in the Enchiridion, the Discourses we can search or Long’s fragments; Stoic quotes on anger shows the real passages it seems to blend.

“Two ears and one mouth” is more tangled. Diogenes Laertius tells it of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism (Lives 7.23; see fake Stoic quotes), but a version also appears as Fragment 142 in Long’s collection, among the same uncertain sayings as the line about self-mastery. Credit Zeno; if you credit Epictetus, call it a fragment.

Interpretations add to the confusion: Sharon Lebell’s The Art of Living (1995) restates Epictetus in her own sentences, which are hers even when shared under his name (more on that book). To test a line yourself, paste it into the checker:

Where these quotes come from

Epictetus is not known to have written anything. His student Arrian, who heard him teach at Nicopolis in northwestern Greece, recorded the lectures as the Discourses, of which four books survive, and drew the Enchiridion from them. How to cite the Stoics gives the formats for both.

Every passage here is checked against A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus with the Encheiridion, free at Project Gutenberg (opens in a new tab): the whole handbook and a selection of the Discourses. Start with the Enchiridion, which takes well under an hour to read. For his life, see Epictetus; for the other two Stoics most often quoted, Marcus Aurelius quotes and Seneca quotes.