Date: 101

"You may fetter my leg, but my will not even Zeus himself can overpower."

— Epictetus (c. 55-c.135)

Date: 101

"Because the gods have given the vine, or wheat, we sacrifice to them: but because they have produced in the human mind that fruit by which they designed to show us the truth which relates to happiness, shall we not thank God for this?"

— Epictetus (c. 55-c.135)

Date: 101

"I indeed think that the old man ought to be sitting here, not to contrive how you may have no mean thoughts nor mean and ignoble talk about yourselves, but to take care that there be not among us any young men of such a mind that, when they have recognized their kinship to God, and that we are f...

— Epictetus (c. 55-c.135)

Date: 101

"Is, then, the fruit of a fig-tree not perfected suddenly and in one hour, and would you possess the fruit of a man's mind in so short a time and so easily?"

— Epictetus (c. 55-c.135)

Date: 101

"'For,' it was his habit to say, 'as a stone, if you cast it upward, will be brought down to the earth by its own nature, so the man whose mind is naturally good, the more you repel him, the more he turns toward that to which he is naturally inclined.'"

— Epictetus (c. 55-c.135)

Date: 101

One should be cautious in his intimacies because, "[f]or if a man places a piece of quenched charcoal close to a piece that is burning, either the quenched charcoal will quench the other, or the burning charcoal will light that which is quenched."

— Epictetus (c. 55-c.135)

Date: 101

"Until then the good sentiments are fixed in you, and you shall have acquired a certain power for your security, I advise you to be careful in your association with common persons: if you are not, every day like wax in the sun there will be melted away whatever you inscribe on your minds in the s...

— Epictetus (c. 55-c.135)

Date: 101

"But if you consider what is proper for a man, examine your store-house, see with what faculties you came into the world."

— Epictetus (c. 55-c.135)

Date: 101

"I mean the things which belong to him as a man, the marks (stamps) in his mind with which he came into the world, such as we seek also on coins, and if we find them, we approve of the coins, and if we do not find the marks, we reject them."

— Epictetus (c. 55-c.135)

Date: 1596

"What tell you me of conscience? Conscience was hanged long agoe."

— Perkins, William (1558-1602)