Quratulain’s Reviews > Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus's Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior > Status Update

“…the thing that brings down a man is not pain but shame!”

“…frequent sessions with your interrogator to check your attitude and if judged wrong, then down the torture chute of confession, guilt, apology and atonement.”

“The judgement seat and a prison is each a place, the one high, the other low; but the attitude of your will can be kept the same, if you want to keep it the same, in either place.”

“Control fear. Control guilt.”

“Look not for any greater harm than this: destroying the trustworthy, self-respecting well-behaved man within you.”

“Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the Will; and say this to yourself with regard to everything that happens. For you will find such things to be an impediment to something else, but not truly to yourself.”

“If you want to protect yourself from fear and guilt- the real long-term destroyers of will- you will have to get rid of all your instincts to compromise, to meet people halfway.”

Never beg: “For it is better to die of hunger, exempt from fear and guilt, than to live in affluence with perturbation.”

“A man’s master is he who is able to confer or remove whatever that man seeks or shuns. Whoever then would be free, let him wish nothing, let him decline nothing, which depends on others; else he must necessarily be a slave.”

“He who craves or shuns things not under his control can either be faithful nor free, but must himself be changed and tossed to and fro and must end by subordinating himself to others.”