- Look into their minds, at what the wise do and what they
don’t. - Nothing that goes on in anyone else’s mind can harm you.
Nor can the shifts and changes in the world around you.
—Then where is harm to be found?In your capacity to see it. Stop doing that and everything
will be fine. Let the part of you that makes that judgment keep
quiet even if the body it’s attached to is stabbed or burnt, or
stinking with pus, or consumed by cancer. Or to put it another
way: It needs to realize that what happens to everyone—bad
and good alike—is neither good nor bad. That what happens
in every life—lived naturally or not—is neither natural nor
unnatural.
- The world as a living being—one nature, one soul. Keep
that in mind. And how everything feeds into that single
experience, moves with a single motion. And how everything
helps produce everything else. Spun and woven together. - “A little wisp of soul carrying a corpse.”—Epictetus.
- There is nothing bad in undergoing change—or good in
emerging from it. - Time is a river, a violent current of events, glimpsed