Protect what belongs to you at all costs; don’t desire what belongs to another.
Adopt new habits yourself: consolidate your principles by putting them into practice.
For where you find unrest, grief, fear, frustrated desire, failed aversion, jealousy and envy, happiness has no room for admittance. And where values are false, these passions inevitably follow.
We should realize that an opinion is not easily formed unless a person says and hears the same things every day and practises them in real life.
Restrict yourself to choice and refusal; and exercise them carefully, with discipline and detachment.
It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgements concerning them.
You will never have to experience defeat if you avoid contests whose outcome is outside your control.
If you have assumed a character beyond your strength, you have both played a poor figure in that, and neglected one that is within your powers.
Who, then, is the invincible human being? One who can be disconcerted by nothing that lies outside the sphere of choice.
If you choose, you are free; if you choose, you need blame no man – accuse no man. All things will be at once according to your mind and according to the Mind of God.
If you wish it, you are free; if you wish it, you’ll find fault with no one, you’ll cast blame on no one, and everything that comes about will do so in accordance with your own will and that of God.
Finally, when he crowns it off by becoming a senator, then he becomes a slave in fine company, then he experiences the poshest and most prestigious form of enslavement.
Man, what are you talking about? Me in chains? You may fetter my leg but my will, not even Zeus himself can overpower.
When then any man assents to that which is false, be assured that he did not intend to assent to it as false, for every soul is unwillingly deprived of the truth, as Plato says; but the falsity seemed to him to be true.
He who is discontented with what he has, and with what has been granted to him by fortune, is one who is ignorant of the art of living, but he who bears that in a noble spirit, and makes reasonable use of all that comes from it, deserves to be regarded as a good man.
I must die; so must I die groaning too?
In literature, too, it is not great achievement to memorize what you have read while not formulating an opinion of your own.
The gods do not exists, and even if they exist they do not trouble themselves about people, and we have nothing in common with them. The piety and devotion to the gods that the majority of people invoke is a lie devised by swindlers and con men and, if you can believe it, by legislators, to keep criminals in line by putting the fear of God into them.
Those proficient praise no one, blame no one, and accuse no one. They say nothing concerning their self as being anybody or knowing anything.
Demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.