Stoic Books
Epictetus’s Discourses
Extended conversations on choice, impressions, roles, freedom, training, and the use of appearances.
What this text offers
Extended conversations on choice, impressions, roles, freedom, training, and the use of appearances. Ask Stoics preserves this edition as a searchable public-domain source rather than presenting isolated quotations without context.
The library contains 200 passage records from this work, with locators and edition provenance.
How to study it
Begin with a live question, read more than the first matching excerpt, and compare the passage with its surrounding argument.
Then choose one existing practice that turns the distinction into a concrete act of attention, restraint, courage, justice, or review.
Questions to bring to the text
Search this work for choice, impressions, roles, and freedom. For each result, ask what claim is being made, what distinction supports it, and what kind of conduct follows.
Compare several passages before drawing a conclusion. The same word can serve a different part of an argument in another book, letter, or conversation.
From reading to practice
Write one sentence that preserves the author’s distinction in your own situation without turning the source into a slogan or an external promise.
Choose one act that remains yours—attention, assent, refusal, intention, speech, or conduct—and return afterward to the passage to test whether your reading held up.
Keep the locator beside your note. On the next reading, revise the note if the wider argument corrects or complicates your first interpretation.
Edition and provenance
Translation: George Long. Coverage: complete surviving work. Rights status: public domain in the launch territories.
The source link and locator attached to every excerpt let the reader return to the preserved edition.
Primary-text evidence
These excerpts are shown with their exact work locators. Read them as evidence for study, not as detached slogans.
“Of all the faculties (except that which I shall soon mention), you will find not one which is capable of contemplating itself, and, consequently, not capable either of approving or disapproving. How far does the grammatic art possess the contemplating power? As far as forming a judgment about what is written and spoken. And how far music? As far as judging about melody. Does either of them then contemplate itself? By no means. But when you must write something to your friend, grammar will tell you what words you should write; but whether you should write or not, grammar will not tell you. And so it is with music as to musical sounds; but whether you should sing at the present time and play on the lute, or do neither, music will not tell you. What…”
“Why then do you say nothing to me? I can only say this to you, that he who knows not who he is, and for what purpose he exists, and what is this world, and with whom he is associated, and what things are the good and the bad, and the beautiful and the ugly, and who neither understands discourse nor demonstration, nor what is true nor what is false, and who is not able to distinguish them, will neither desire according to nature nor turn away nor move towards, nor intend (to act), nor assent nor dissent, nor suspend his judgment: to say all in a few words, he will go about dumb and blind, thinking that he is somebody, but being nobody. Is this so now for the first time? Is it not the fact that ever since the human race existed, all errors and…”
““True: but I trust you; you do not trust me.”—In the first place, not even do you trust me, but you are a babbler, and for this reason you cannot hold anything; for indeed, if it is true that you trust me, trust your affairs to me only; but now whenever you see a man at leisure, you seat yourself by him and say: “Brother, I have no friend more benevolent than you nor dearer; I request you to listen to my affairs.” And you do this even to those who are not known to you at all. But if you really trust me, it is plain that you trust me because I am faithful and modest, not because I have told my affairs to you. Allow me then to have the same opinion about you. Show me that if one man tells his affairs to another, he who tells them is faithful and…”