If you are ever tempted to look for outside approval, realize that you have compromised your integrity.
- Topic: Integrity, Self
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from Epictetus
Keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.
Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet. As something is being passed around it comes to you; stretch out your hand, take a portion of it politely. It passes on; do not detain it. Or it has not come to you yet; do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you. So act toward children, so act toward a wife, so toward office, so toward wealth.
Any one thing in creation is sufficient to demonstrate a Providence to a humble and grateful mind.
Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.
Just keep in mind: the more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.
The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.
More on These Topics
Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.
It cannot be your duty to do anything that is beyond your reach or your strength at the moment. It cannot be your duty to do anything that sacrifices your own integrity or your own spiritual development.
When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, butt in favors - When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - You may know that your society is doomed.
No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.
I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
Success is simple. Do what's right, the right way, at the right time.
If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
If you are ever tempted to look for outside approval, realize that you have compromised your own integrity. If you need a witness, be your own.
Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility.
A great man is hard on himself; a small man is hard on others.
If you spend your time hoping someone will suffer the consequences for what they did to your heart, then you’re allowing them to hurt you a second time in your mind.
Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.
The whole universe is contained within a single human being—you.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
A friend is as it were a second self.
It is of particular value to learn to like yourself. Since you must spend so much time with yourself you might as well get some satisfaction out of the relationship.
The man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of everything else to which he is justly entitled.