The Art of Living: The Classical Mannual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness

Read them. Learn from them. Apply their wisdom. Do you have specialized knowledge? Put it to its full and good use. Do you have tools? Get them out and build or repair things with them. Do you have a good idea? Follow up and follow through on it. Make the most of what you’ve got, what is actually yours.

The marks of good reasoning are clarity, consistency, rigor, precision of definitions, and avoidance of ambiguity. Hasten to your training in clear thinking so you can confidently enter a complex argument and not be thrown by it.

By the steady but patient commitment to removing unsound beliefs from our souls, we become increasingly adept at seeing through our flimsy fears, our bewilderment in love, and our lack of self control. We stop trying to look good to others. One day, we contentedly realize we’ve stopped playing to the crowd.

Anticipating this spiritual backlash, he asked if I would write a contemporary interpretation {not a translation!) of Epictetus’s most important teachings in the spirit of Stephen Mitchell’s easy-to-read version of the Tao Te Ching.

Freedom comes from understanding the limits of our own power and the natural limits set in place by divine providence. By accepting life’s limits and inevitabilities and working with them rather than fighting them, we become free. If, on the other hand, we succumb to our passing desires for things that aren’t in our control, freedom is lost.

You have been given your own work to do. Get to it right now, do your best at it, and don’t be concerned with who is watching you.

Stop aspiring to be anyone other than your own best self: for that does fall within your control.

It is always our choice whether or not we wish to pay the price for life’s rewards. And often it is best for us not to pay the price, for the price might be our integrity. We could be forced to praise someone whom we don’t respect.

Don’t give too much weight to erudition alone. Look to the example of people whose actions are consistent with their professed principles.