Epictetus’s Five Most Significant Quotes

In today's Sunday Podcast, Ryan talks about Epictetus, who from birth was enslaved yet still managed to become one of the most significant founders of Stoicism, and gives five of his most important quotes. This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. Four Sigmatic is a maker of mushroom coffee, lattes, elixirs, and more. Their drinks all taste amazing and they've full of all sorts of all-natural compounds and immunity boosters to help you think clearly and live well. Four Sigmatic has a new exclusive deal for Daily Stoic listeners: get up to 39% off their bestselling Lion’s Mane bundle by visiting foursigmatic.com/stoic.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I hope everyone is doing great. You know, it's a crazy world out there, crazy and, you know, not all that different than the world our friend Epictetus lived in. Political corruption, you know, civil unrest. All of the things that we are struggling with today would not be unfamiliar to Epictetus. And he had to add on top of that some 30 years of slavery.

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  And so I think that the core then of Epictetus's teachings is a quote we're going to kick through a little bit today. This idea that philosophy is something you embody. It's not just something you talk about. And obviously, that's tricky for me because my job is, in some respects, talking about it. But I hope that you understand that I, like you, am ultimately struggling to apply these things in the real world. That's why we're here. That's what we are trying to do. There's no reason to study the philosophy for shits and giggles, if you will, right? The point is, how do you apply this to your life? And how do you apply? Quiet in a world that is ultimately not just unpredictable,

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  but in Epictetus's case, quite cruel, right? His leg is broken, he's born into slavery, he walks with a limp for the rest of his days. He's forced to live hundreds of miles from Rome because he's driven out of Rome per a blanket ban on philosophers. So when we think about the Stoics, we're not just thinking about their words, we're thinking about the lives that those words were then applied to, which is, of course, the premise of the new book, Lives of the Stoics, which you can preorder now, dailystoic.com/lives. But I just remain endlessly fascinated with Epictetus.

• 2:54Ryan Holiday?

  You know, all the Stoics talk about the importance of freedom, and yet so many of them did so from a place of obviously immense privilege and wealth, right? They were Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Panateus and Postidonius. For the most part, almost all the Stoics came from a place of immense privilege. They were at the top of Rome's hierarchy, and there was really nowhere worse to be than at the bottom of Rome's hierarchy. Cleanthes, who we talk about in The Lives of Stoics, was at the bottom, but even he was a free man. He was a manual laborer and worked for a living, but certainly no one had sort of literal power over life and death from him.

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  No one could steal his wages from him. Even his sort of subservient position to Zeno was just nothing compared to what Epictetus went through. So Epictetus, to me, is just an awe-inspiring, mind-boggling figure. And so today, we're going to look through five of his best quotes, what they mean, and, most importantly, how we apply them.

• 4:02Ryan Holiday?

  He was born a slave and died one of the most influential teachers of his time. But Epictetus wouldn't have considered himself a teacher. He was a philosopher, a Stoic philosopher, a man who sought a very specific kind of knowledge, the knowledge that when applied helped with facing and overcoming the inevitable difficulties of life. And through a combination of his own life experiences and the wisdom of his mentor, the Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus, Epictetus had the kind of insights that people traveled hundreds of miles for the chance to hear, even if only for an hour or two. They sent their children to hear him. Even the poor, the affluent, the powerful, even the future emperor Hadrian, were told

• 4:44Ryan Holiday?

  they all vied for a chance to sit in and sit down at Epictetus's feet. And fortunately, there was a young man who regularly got to listen in to Epictetus, and he wrote down what Epictetus had to say. And remarkably, these notes survived to us and have been passed on to some of history's greatest figures over the last few thousand years. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his journal thanking the man who had loaned him a copy of Epictetus. Theodore Roosevelt famously carried a copy of Epictetus with him along his incredibly dangerous River of Doubt expedition. Admiral James Stockdale had Epictetus with him as he led fighter squadrons in daily combat in Vietnam, and it was on Epictetus whom he leaned when he'd had to survive seven

• 5:28Ryan Holiday?

  years as a prisoner of war. The list is endless, and hopefully after this video, you'll understand why and add your name to the list of Epictetus's admirers, because he truly was one of the wisest and most inspiring people to ever live. So here are five quotes from Epictetus that will change your life. "Our first job is this," Epictetus said, "to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to what I do control. Where will I find good and bad in me, in my choices?" This single skill, Epictetus said, "will change your life: the art of differentiating between what's up to us and what is not up to us, what we have influence over and what we do..."

• 6:11Ryan Holiday?

  Do not. A flight is delayed because of weather. No amount of yelling at an airline representative will end the storm. No amount of wishing will make you taller or shorter or born in a different country. No matter how hard you try, you can't make someone like you. On top of all that, time spent hurling yourself at these immovable objects is time not spent on the things we can change. As Epictetus said, "All we can control is the choices they make right now." And the same is true for you. Focus on making clear what parts of your day are within your control and what parts are not. You will not only be happier, but you will have a distinct advantage over all the people who fail to realize they are wasting their time on unwinnable battles.

• 6:53Ryan Holiday?

  "It is not events that disturb people," Epictetus said. "It's their judgment about things." Albert Ellis, one of the most influential figures in modern psychology, said it was this line that guided the development of cognitive behavioral therapy. Epictetus said, "It was the most important power we have. Something happens, but we decide that it's unfair, or bad, or a failure. Someone says something, but we decide that it's offensive, or presumptuous, or rude. If someone succeeds in provoking you," Epictetus said, "realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation. Events are objective. The opinion that they're objectionable is just that, your opinion, and you always have the power to change it." There's a reason this very quote is on the wall of the training facility of the Pittsburgh Pirates

• 7:37Ryan Holiday?

  in Bradenton, Florida, because even in sports, it matters, right? There is no good or bad. There is just the game in front of you. You have to focus on that. No amount of yelling or complaining changes an umpire's call. You have to focus. You have to be present. You can't beat yourself down or puff yourself up. "Get rid of self-conceit," Epictetus said. "It is impossible to learn that which one thinks they already know." Epictetus kept his eyes and ears open, always actively looking for opportunities to learn from everyone and everything. And this is the attitude we must take with us, day in and day out, whether we're one of the best at what we do or just starting out. It doesn't matter. Every person we meet, every situation we find ourselves in, every book-

• 8:21Ryan Holiday?

  Book we read or movie we watch, there is an opportunity to learn, to keep getting better, to take another step forward on the path to progress. And that was one of Epictetus's favorite questions. How have you made progress? More than anything else, we answer that question by focusing on what we don't know, on where we can get better, on where we can improve, rather than patting ourselves on the back for how great we are. "The true man is revealed in difficult times," Epictetus said. "So when trouble comes, think of yourself as a wrestler paired with a tough young buck. For what purpose? To turn you into Olympic class material." "We can think of hardship many ways, as failure, as unfairness, as the end of the conversation. Clearly, this was not meant to be, we say. They don't want me to succeed. What's the point in trying?"

• 9:04Ryan Holiday?

  Or we can choose, we can train ourselves to see it a better way. As grist for the mill, as a chance to learn about endurance, patience, resilience, struggle, as a chance to prove our mettle. As resistance that is making our muscles stronger, as a sparring partner. Epictetus preferred the latter and became in his time and in ours, the ultimate symbol of the ability of a human being to overcome dark circumstances. He said, "It was not about accepting hardship or resigning ourselves to it, but agreeing to work with it, to decide to make the most of it, to see hardship as an opportunity, not as an obstacle. And in this way, we can turn everything that happens to us into fuel, and we can be made better and stronger by everything that happens." And so we have one more quote to come from Epictetus.

• 9:47Ryan Holiday?

  But before I do, if you're interested at all in Stoic philosophy, I'd love to have you join us in the daily email, the daily meditation we do at Daily Stoic, dailystoic.com/email. It's one Stoic thought every single day for free, designed to help inspire you, instill this ancient wisdom in your life, and help you practice those four Stoic virtues of courage, moderation, justice, and wisdom that were so essential to Epictetus and will help you become the person you want to become. And if you've heard about the email and have delayed signing up, let me give you a quick quote from Epictetus. He says, "How much longer until you demand the best for yourself?" And that's what we try to do in this email. And so the last quote from Epictetus is this. "Don't explain your philosophy, embody it." It's always been tempting to talk a good game.

• 10:31Ryan Holiday?

  And people have been doing it for thousands of years. Epictetus talked about those nauseating types who brag about how many books they've read and spew out facts and quotes and tidbits. These people are not wise, he'd say, they just know a lot of useless trivia. The whole point of Stoicism is what you do. It's who you are. It's an act of virtue, not talking about virtue, or reading about it, or writing about it, or watching videos about it. If you didn't learn these things in order to demonstrate them in practice, Epictetus asked, what did you learn them for? He would have loved the expression we have today, don't talk about it, be about it. How much better would we all be if we put less energy into talking and more into being and into doing, in letting our actions and results speak for us, in turning the lessons

• 11:13Ryan Holiday?

  of an Epictetus, or a Musonius Rufus, or a Marcus Aurelius into real-world action and results? And that, Epictetus said, is what earns one the title philosopher, nothing else. So if you're interested in finding more about Epictetus, please sign up, dailystoic.com/email. And as Epictetus said, don't talk about your philosophy, embody it.

• 11:37Ryan Holiday?

  If you like the podcast that we do here and you want to get it via email every morning, you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.