Epictetus Quotes

I believe God is real, but I believe God calls me beyond myself to take responsibility for my life and to try top work to allow other people to be themselves and to take responsibility for their lives.

I think what's important for kids to know is that your decisions here on earth matter, your behavior matters and how you treat other people matters.

The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.

Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences.

I live my life and I do what I do, and sometimes you forget that people are watching you.

It sounds odd coming from me, but I realize what I say and how I look has a great impact.

Evil is important for us to look at, in my opinion, only insofar as it makes us look at our own actions and make us wonder, 'Am I participating in some kind of human evil that I really should stop doing?'

Personal responsibility is not only recognizing the errors of our ways. Personal responsibility lies in our willingness and ability to correct those errors individually and collectively.

That's a central part of philosophy, of ethics. What do I owe to strangers? What do I owe to my family? What is it to live a good life? Those are questions which we face as individuals.

Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.

'The Author' is a play about responsibility, how active we are as spectators and how responsible we are for what we choose to look at.

I find that people... very few people think that what they're doing is bad, and usually the people who think what they're doing is bad it has more to do with guilt.

What a man has made himself he will be; his state is the result of his past life, and his heaven or hell is in himself.

I act as if my life depends on each decision. Because it does.

I have to be honest with myself, and make sure I am doing things the right way.

I can create offensive situations for myself and I can create situations for other people.

At times, it appears easy to sermonise on morality and ethics. But morality and ethics appear good only when applied to others, never on oneself.

I have done so many things in my life," she said to the mirror. "Evil things, perhaps. But never unattentively, never wastefully...was I wrong?

To be a real man or woman, you've got to know what you believe in. You've got to understand that your actions have consequences and that they are connected to everything that you are.

We should be careful of the insults we fling at others, lest they return and land at our feet, newly minted to apply to those who had first coined them.

The day firing becomes easy is the day to fire yourself.

Every serious-minded person knows that a large part of the effort required in moral discipline consists in the courage needed to acknowledge the unpleasant consequences of one's past and present acts.

In all the institutions I try to be present and accountable for all I do and leave undone. I know that eventually I shall have to be present and accountable n the presence of God. I do not wish to be found wanting.

Everywhere man blames nature and fate, yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character, and passions, his mistakes, and weaknesses."--Democritus An Abundance of Katherines---John Green

It is the responsibility of every human to know their actions and the consequences of their actions and to ask questions and to question things when they are wrong.