For “Epictetus” read any person, and any thing.- My only fear is doing something contrary to human nature
—the wrong thing, the wrong way, or at the wrong time. - Close to forgetting it all, close to being forgotten.
- To feel affection for people even when they make
mistakes is uniquely human. You can do it, if you simply
recognize: that they’re human too, that they act out of
ignorance, against their will, and that you’ll both be dead
before long. And, above all, that they haven’t really hurt you.
They haven’t diminished your ability to choose. - Nature takes substance and makes a horse. Like a
sculptor with wax. And then melts it down and uses the
material for a tree. Then for a person. Then for something
else. Each existing only briefly.
It does the container no harm to be put together, and none
to be taken apart.
- Anger in the face is unnatural. †... † or in the end is put
out for good, so that it can’t be rekindled. Try to conclude its
unnaturalness from that. (If even the consciousness of acting
badly has gone, why go on living?) - Before long, nature, which controls it all, will alter