Stoic Books
Epictetus’s Enchiridion
A compact manual of distinctions and reminders for daily Stoic practice.
What this text offers
A compact manual of distinctions and reminders for daily Stoic practice. Ask Stoics preserves this edition as a searchable public-domain source rather than presenting isolated quotations without context.
The library contains 53 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 control, desire, impression, and duty. 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 edition. 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 things some are in our power, and others are not. In our power are opinion (ὑπόληψις), movement towards a thing (ὁρμή), desire, aversion (ἔκκλισις, turning from a thing); and in a word, whatever are our own acts: not in our power are the body, property, reputation, offices (magisterial power), and in a word, whatever are not our own acts. And the things in our power are by nature free, not subject to restraint nor hindrance: but the things not in our power are weak, slavish, subject to restraint, in the power of others. Remember then that if you think the things which are by nature slavish to be free, and the things which are in the power of others to be your own, you will be hindered, you will lament, you will be disturbed, you will blame both…”
“As a mark is not set up for the purpose of missing the aim, so neither does the nature of evil exist in the world.”
“In everything (circumstance) we should hold these maxims ready to hand: And the third also: O Crito, if so it pleases the Gods, so let it be; Anytus and Melitus are able indeed to kill me, but they cannot harm me.”