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Books, A to Z On 3 of the 12 ideas

Enchiridion

Epictetus c. 125 CE

1 earliest we can find2 Echoes

Ideas we have traced through this book

c. 125 CE

Some things are up to you

Earliest we can find

This is the earliest source we can find for the idea. Said again in 8 books on our list: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (c. 175), Michel de Montaigne, Essays (1580), René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637), Arnold Bennett, The Human Machine (1908), Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (1930), Reinhold Niebuhr, as printed by Winnifred Wygal, The Serenity Prayer (1933), Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) and Massimo Pigliucci, How to Be a Stoic (2017).

  1. “There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power. Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own. Beyond our power are body, property, reputation, office, and, in one word, whatever are not properly our own affairs.”

Full text read.

Epictetus, Enchiridion 1, tr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1865).

Project Gutenberg eBook #45109, gutenberg.org/ebooks/45109.

08

Keep your death in mind

Echoes

Epictetus says to keep death “daily before your eyes”, and “you will never entertain an abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything”. He credits no one that we can find.

  1. by the 2nd c. BCE
    “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”

    Psalm 90. Earliest we can find, more than 200 years earlier.

  2. 125 CE
    “Let death and exile, and all other things which appear terrible, be daily before your eyes, but death chiefly; and you will never entertain an abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything.”

Full text read.

Epictetus, Enchiridion, tr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1865).

Project Gutenberg eBook #45109, gutenberg.org/ebooks/45109.

03

It’s your view of things that upsets you

Echoes

Epictetus states it outright, “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things,” and credits no one that we can find; Socrates appears only as an example.

  1. 45 BCE
    “The whole cause, then, is in opinion; and this observation applies not to this grief alone, but to every other disorder of the mind”

    Cicero, Tusculan Disputations. Earliest we can find, 169 years earlier.

  2. 125 CE
    “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.”

Full text read.

Epictetus, Enchiridion, tr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1865).

Project Gutenberg eBook #45109, gutenberg.org/ebooks/45109.

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