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You become what you give your attention to. If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest.

Epictetus

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.
EPICTETUS

Death Depression Fear Love Pain
I laugh at those who think they can damage me. They do not know who I am, they do not know what I think, they cannot even touch the things which are really mine and with which I live.
EPICTETUS

Attitude Damage Laugh Live Thinking
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. Create your own merit.
EPICTETUS

Concern Creation Giving Motivational Watch Work
Wisdom means understanding without any doubt that circumstances do not rise to meet our expectations. Events happen as they may. People behave as they will.
EPICTETUS

Behaviour Circumstance Expectation People Understand Wisdom
If you wish to be good, first believe that you are bad.
EPICTETUS

Bad Believe Goodness Improvement One Liner
If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.
EPICTETUS

Book Poet Reading Writing
Every difficulty in life presents us with an opportunity to turn inward and to invoke our own submerged inner resources. The trials we endure can and should introduce us to our strengths.
EPICTETUS

Endure Introduce Life Opportunity Resource Strength
Don’t consent to be hurt and you won’t be hurt – this is a choice over which you have control.
EPICTETUS

Choice Consent Control Healing Hurt Inspirational
Try not to react merely in the moment. Pull back from the situation. Take a wider view. Compose yourself.
EPICTETUS

Moments Patience Reaction Situation Try Yourself
The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.
EPICTETUS

Company Friendship Key People Presence
The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.
EPICTETUS

Difficult Motivational Pilot Reputation Skill Storm
What concerns me is not the way things are, but rather the way people think things are.
EPICTETUS

Attitude Concern Human Nature People Thinking
Difficulty shows what men are.
EPICTETUS

Character Difficult Men One Liner
We all dread a bodily paralysis, and would make use of every contrivance to avoid it; but none of us is troubled about a paralysis of the soul.
EPICTETUS

Avoid Body Pralysis Soul Trouble
Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle.
EPICTETUS

Beginning Clear Freedom Happiness Principle Understand
We all carry the seeds of greatness within us, but we need an image as a point of focus in order that they may sprout.
EPICTETUS

Carry Focus Greatness Inspirational Need Seed

You become what you give your attention to. If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest.

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You become what you give your attention to. If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Epictetus Quotes