“Across centuries and cultures, world leaders, generals, and ordinary folk alike have relied on The Manual (Epictetus) as their main guide to personal serenity and moral direction amid the trials of life.”

from Art of Living

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“a soft Easterly wind seem to blow when Epictetus discusses the nature of the universe. His depiction of Ultimate Reality which he equates with Nature itself, is remarkably fluid and elusive: startlingly reminiscent of the Tao.”

from Art of Living

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“One of the wittiest teachers who ever lived, Epictetus believed that the primary job of philosophy is to help ordinary people effectively meet the everyday challengs of daily life... His was a moral teaching stripped of sentimentality, piousness, and metaphysical mumbo jumbo.”

from Art of Living

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“Goodness is an equal opportunity enterprise, available to anyone at any time: rich or poor, educated or simple. It is not the exclusive province of 'spiritual professinals,' such as monks, saints, or ascetics.”

from Art of Living

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“The Stoic conception of virtue espoused by Epictetus has left an indelible and under appreciated imprint on our culture. Descartes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marx and the Founding Fathers of the United States are just a few of the movers and shakers who owe a great debt to Stoic ethical thought.”

from Art of Living

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“Philosophy asks us to move into courage. It's remedy is the unblinking excavation of the faulty and specious premies on which we base our lives and our personal identity.”

from Art of Living

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“Inner confusion and evil itself spring from ambiguity.”

from Art of Living

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“Goodness exists independently of our conception of it. The good is out there and it always has been out there, even before we began to exist.”

from Art of Living

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“A life based on narrow self-interest cannot be esteemed by any honorable measurement... View yourself as a citizen of a worldwide community and act accordingly.”

from Art of Living

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“Books are the training weights of the mind... very helpful but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.”

from Art of Living

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“Books are the training weights of the mind... very helpful but it would be a bad mistake to supposed that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.”

from Art of Living

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“You bank on your pursuits to give you happiness, thus confusing means with ends... while the pursuit of such indifferent objectives is natural, neither failure nor success in attaining them has the slightest bearing on your happiness.”

from Art of Living

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“The appropriate response to bad deeds is pity for the perpetrators, since they have adopted unsound beliefs and are deprived of the most valuable human capacity: the ability to differentiate between what's truly good and bad for them... pity them rather than yield to hatred and anger as so many do.”

from Art of Living

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