When at a small cost you are supplied with every thing
for the body, do not be proud of this; nor, if you drink
water, say on every occasion, I drink water. But consider
first how much more frugal the poor are than we, and how
much more enduring of labour. And if you ever wish to
exercise yourself in labour and endurance, do it for yourself, and not for others: do not embrace statues.1 But if
you are ever very thirsty, take a draught of cold water,
and spit it out, and tell no man.
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
1 See iii. 12.
The Discourses of Epictetus, with the Encheridion and Fragments. Epictetus. George Long. translator. London. George Bell and Sons. 1890.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.