Epictetus Quotes

The truth is a trap: you can not get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.

Reason is like an officer when the King appears;
The officer then loses his power and hides himself.
Reason is the shadow cast by God; God is the sun.

Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it, but fear I must.

African music, though very old, is always being rediscovered in the West.

Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.

The tragedy of civil wars in countries like Angola and Mozambique is that they left many civilians maimed. Poverty is the reason HIV/AIDS spread so rapidly in the African townships and slums. Poverty is the real killer.

I can't love you in the dark,
It feels like we're oceans apart.
There is so much space between us,
Baby, we're already defeated.
Ah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah, everything changed me.

We are never ever ever... getting back together.
We are never ever ever... getting back together.
You go talk to your friends, talk to my friends, talk to me.
But we are never ever ever ever... getting back together.
Like, ever.

For this too is a very pleasant strand woven into the Cynic's pattern of life; he must needs be flogged like an ass, and while he is being flogged he must love the men who flog him, as though he were the father or brother of them all.

I ain't a killer, but don't push me
Revenge is like the sweetest joy next to gettin' pussy.

This is approximately the way Christendom relates to the essentially Christian, the unconditioned. After seventeen, eighteen detours and running all around someone finally has his finite existence assured, and then we receive a sermon about Seek first the kingdom of God. Is this sobriety or is this intoxication? p. 112

Cocaine addiction is God's way of saying "You make too damn much money!

[W]hen the President's visitors came to Guinea, we were all called on to go and entertain them. I've never seen a country that did what Sékou Touré did for artists. Even in South Africa today we are not nurtured like that.

You sound like a hillbilly; We want folk singers here.

Let us suppose that a man believes in eternal life on Christ's word. In that case he believes without any fuss about being profound and searching and philosophical and racking his brains.

Never mind, I'll find someone like you,
I wish nothing but the best for you, too.
Don't forget me, I beg.
I remember you said,
"Sometimes it lasts in love,
But sometimes it hurts instead.