Do not seek to bring things to pass in accordance with your wishes, but wish for them as they are, and you will find them.
What concerns me is not the way things are, but rather the way people think they are.
- Topic: Awareness, Thinking
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from Epictetus
How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?
Any one thing in creation is sufficient to demonstrate a Providence to a humble and grateful mind.
When you close your doors, and make darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not alone.
Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.
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.
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Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousand of miles and all the years you have lived.
The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.
To fly as fast as thought, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.
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.
You must try to observe yourself more and more objectively, to look at everything in yourself as though another person.
Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you do or as fast. There is a time when you didn't know what you know today.
For all men strive to grasp what they do not know, while none strive to grasp what they already know; and all strive to discredit what they do not excel in, while none strive to discredit what they do excel in. This is why there is chaos.
There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.
All that is important in this moment is movement. Make the movement vital and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.
I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.
If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy and inspires your hopes.
Ignorance never settle a question.
Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.
