The condition and characteristic of an uninstructed person is this: he never expects from himself profit (advantage) nor harm, but from externals. The condition and
characteristic of a philosopher is this: he expects all advantage and all harm from himself. The signs (marks)
of one who is making progress are these: he censures no
man, he praises no man, he blames no man, he accuses no
man, he says nothing about himself as if he were somebody or knew something; when he is impeded at all or
hindered, he blames himself: if a man praises him, he
ridicules the praiser to himself: if a man censures him, he
makes no defence: he goes about like weak persons, being
careful not to move any of the things which are placed,
before they are firmly fixed: he removes all desire from
himself, and he transfers aversion (ἔκκλισιν) to those things
only of the things within our power which are contrary to
nature: he employs a moderate movement towards every
thing: whether he is considered foolish or ignorant, he
cares not: and in a word he watches himself as if he were
an enemy and lying in ambush.
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
The Discourses of Epictetus, with the Encheridion and Fragments. Epictetus. George Long. translator. London. George Bell and Sons. 1890.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.