Essential Life Skills
Face the Essential Truths through The Enchiridion
Theme-by-theme chapter breakdowns of the essential life skills in this classic work. 6 deep dives tracing how Epictetus's story teaches skills you can use today.
A Lame Leg, a Free Will
The handbook does not open with a sermon on courage. It opens with two piles. Opinion, aim, desire, aversion: free, unrestricted, unhindered. Body, property, reputation, office: weak, dependent, restricted, alien. Mix the piles and you will lament, you will find fault with gods and men. Keep them sorted and no one can compel you. Then comes the drill for every unpleasing face the day puts on: say to it, you are but a semblance and by no means the real thing.
Bound Like a Sheep
Begin with the merest trifles. If you have a favorite cup, remember that it is but a cup. When it breaks, you can bear it. If you embrace your child or your wife, remember that you embrace a mortal. When either of them dies, you can bear it. The practice is not a rehearsal of cruelty. It is a refusal to love a fiction: that the beloved was issued as permanent property.
Death Did Not Frighten Socrates
Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things. Death is nothing terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. The terror is the notion that death is terrible. When you are hindered, disturbed, or grieved, do not impute it to others. Impute it to your own views. The uninstructed person reproaches others for his misfortunes. The person entering instruction reproaches himself. The person perfectly instructed reproaches neither.
Now the Olympiad Comes On
If you have an earnest desire toward philosophy, prepare from the very first to have the multitude laugh and sneer. He is returned to us a philosopher all at once. Whence this supercilious look? Do not have a supercilious look. Keep steadily to what appears best to you, as one appointed to this particular station. If you are persistent, those who ridiculed will afterwards admire you. If you are conquered by them, you will incur a double ridicule: for trying, and for quitting under the laugh.
Sold for Attendance
If you turn your attention to externals for the pleasure of anyone, be assured that you have ruined your scheme of life. Be content, in everything, with being a philosopher. If you wish to seem so likewise to anyone, appear so to yourself, and it will suffice you. The audience you need is the one already sitting in your own skull. Recruiting a second audience is how the scheme comes down.
Wool and Milk, Not Grass
Never proclaim yourself a philosopher. Do not make much talk among the ignorant about your principles. Show them by actions. At an entertainment, do not discourse how people ought to eat. Eat as you ought. Socrates avoided ostentation so thoroughly that when people asked him to introduce them to philosophers, he took them and introduced them. He bore being overlooked. If the ignorant discuss principles, be for the most part silent. There is great danger in hastily throwing out what is undigested. If anyone tells you that you know nothing, and you are not nettled, you have really entered on your work. Sheep do not throw up the grass to show the shepherds how much they have eaten. They digest inwardly and produce wool and milk.