Discourses, Fragments, Handbook (Oxford World's Classics)

With regard to everything that happens to you, remember to look inside yourself and see what capacity you have to enable you to deal with it. If

just as Socrates used to say that we shouldn’t live an unexamined life, we shouldn’t accept any impression without subjecting it to examination, but should say to it, ‘Wait, let me see who you are, and where you’ve come

What, then, should we have at hand to help us in such emergencies? Why, what else than to know what is mine and what isn’t mine, and what is in my power and what isn’t?

What is it that makes use of everything else? Choice. What is it that takes charge of everything else? Choice. What is it that destroys the whole person, sometimes through hunger, sometimes through a noose, sometimes by hurling him over a cliff? Choice. [18] Can it be, then, that there is anything more powerful among human beings than this?

Won’t you keep in mind who you are, and who these people are whom you are ruling over? That they belong to the same family, that they are by nature brothers of yours, that they are offspring of Zeus?

I will say that it is natural for the foot* to be clean, taken in isolation, but if you consider it as a foot and not in isolation, it will be appropriate for it also to step into mud, and trample on thorns, and sometimes even to be cut off for the sake of the body as a whole; for otherwise, it will no longer be a foot. [25] We should think in some

For what is weeping and groaning? A judgement. What is misfortune? A judgement. What is civil strife, dissension, fault-finding, accusation, impiety, foolishness? [19] All of these are judgements and nothing more, and judgements that are passed, moreover, about things that lie outside the sphere of choice, under the supposition that such things are

If Heracles* had sat around at home with his family, what would he have been? A Eurystheus, and in no way a Heracles.

What is he incapable, then, of chaining up or cutting off? Your power of choice. It was for that reason that the ancients urged us to follow this precept: Know yourself. [18] So what follows? That we should practise, by heaven, with little things, and after beginning with those, pass on to greater things.