The complete collection

The quote database

Every quote we hold, 1549 of them from 213 people across 387 works. Filter it, sort it, and follow any citation back to the source.
1529 checked at source

Filter the collection

356
On this bit of the wild world's stage are theatrical lightning changes of scenes—changes that on most mountains would require ten thousand years or more. It is a place of strange and fleeting landscapes; the earth is ever changing like the sky.
372
It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.

Attribution contested

The fifth maxim is the source of the modern slogan it is not what happens to you but how you react to it, which translates nothing Epictetus wrote and has no attested author. The paraphrase stops halfway. Epictetus opens by saying men are disturbed by their opinions about things rather than by the things, but he ends here -- taking the blame yourself is only the middle stage, and the finished man blames nobody at all.