The Enchiridion
Epictetus (55–135), 125
A pocket-sized Stoic manual of about fifty short rules for staying steady when people, luck and your own desires push you around. Every page can be tried on a bad day. The short rules feel bracing and free, like a stern friend reminding you what is yours to control.
Feels like serenity, defiance and tenderness. About freedom, morality and death.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you want practical Stoic reminders you can test on ordinary frustrations, not a long argument. The translation's formal, older-sounding wording and tightly packed aphorisms can make some pages need a second pass.
Why read it
It offers a compact way to separate what you control from what you don't, useful when daily noise makes your reactions feel larger than they are.
Pages from the book
What if the terror was never in the thing itself?
Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things. Thus death is nothing terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death, that it is terrible. When, therefore, we are hindered or disturbed, or grieved, let us never impute it to others, but to ourselves—that is, to our own views. It is the action of an uninstructed person to reproach others for his own misfortunes; of one entering upon instruction, to reproach himself; and one perfectly instructed, to reproach neither others nor himself. A way of losing everything without ever calling it loss.
Never say of anything, “I have lost it,” but, “I have restored it.” Has your child died? It is restored. Has your wife died? She is restored. Has your estate been taken away? That likewise is restored. “But it was a bad man who took it.” What is it to you by whose hands he who gave it has demanded it again? While he permits you to possess it, hold it as something not your own, as do travelers at an inn. The day you stop waiting for a better moment to begin.
How long, then, will you delay to demand of yourself the noblest improvements, and in no instance to transgress the judgments of reason? You have received the philosophic principles with which you ought to be conversant; and you have been conversant with them. For what other master, then, do you wait as an excuse for this delay in self-reformation? You are no longer a boy but a grown man. If, therefore, you will be negligent and slothful, and always add procrastination to procrastination, purpose to purpose, and fix day after day in which you will attend to yourself, you will insensibly continue to accomplish nothing and, living and dying, remain of vulgar mind. This instant, then, think yourself worthy of living as a man grown up and a proficient. Let whatever appears to be the best be to you an inviolable law. Epictetus.Born into slavery in Phrygia, Epictetus wrote nothing himself; his student Arrian took down his lectures and distilled the Enchiridion from them. The Greek title means both 'handbook' and 'something held in the hand'.
Books that feel like this
More by Epictetus
Short Works
Epictetus, 125
A freed slave's short, sharp rules for staying free inside your own mind—written for anyone whose peace depends on other people.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Enchiridion for me?
- You may like it if you want practical Stoic reminders you can test on ordinary frustrations, not a long argument. The translation's formal, older-sounding wording and tightly packed aphorisms can make some pages need a second pass.
- What is The Enchiridion like?
- The short rules feel bracing and free, like a stern friend reminding you what is yours to control. Feels like serenity, defiance and tenderness. About freedom, morality and death.
- What should I read after The Enchiridion?
- If you liked The Enchiridion, try Meditations (Marcus Aurelius), Moral Letters to Lucilius (Seneca) and Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience (Henry David Thoreau).
A taste of the feed
Being cursed at, and staying as clear as running water.
‘They kill me, they cut my flesh; they persecute my person with curses.’ What then? May not thy mind for all this continue pure, prudent, temperate, just? As a fountain of sweet and clear water, though she be cursed by some stander by, yet do her springs nevertheless still run as sweet and clear as before; yea though either dirt or dung be thrown in, yet is it no sooner thrown, than dispersed, and she cleared. She cannot be dyed or infected by it. What then must I do, that I may have within myself an overflowing fountain, and not a well? Beget thyself by continual pains and endeavours to true liberty with charity, and true simplicity and modesty.
Meditations · Marcus Aurelius
What if a life were weighed the way gold is weighed?
Pray, let us see to it, my dear Lucilius, that our lives, like jewels of great price, be noteworthy not because of their width but because of their weight. Let us measure them by their performance, not by their duration. Would you know wherein lies the difference between this hardy man who, despising Fortune, has served through every campaign of life and has attained to life’s Supreme Good, and that other person over whose head many years have passed? The former exists even after his death; the latter has died even before he was dead.
Moral Letters to Lucilius · Seneca
Writing a page and later wondering who wrote it.
Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.
Essays · Ralph Waldo Emerson
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