If you would improve, be content to be thought
foolish and dull with regard to externals. Do not desire to be thought to know anything; and though you
should appear to others to be somebody, distrust
yourself. For be assured, it is not easy at once to
keep your will in harmony with nature, and to secure
externals; but while you are absorbed in the one,
you must of necessity neglect the other.
The Works of Epictetus: His Discourses, in Four Books, the Enchiridion, and Fragments. Epictetus. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. translator. New York. Thomas Nelson and Sons. 1890.
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