"Discourses" - читать интересную книгу автора (Epictetus)

why do you mock the man? Why do you draw him away from the
perception of his own misfortunes? Will you not show him the effect of
virtue that he may learn where to look for improvement? Seek it there,
wretch, where your work lies. And where is your work? In desire and in
aversion, that you may not be disappointed in your desire, and that
you may not fall into that which you would avoid; in your pursuit
and avoiding, that you commit no error; in assent and suspension of
assent, that you be not deceived. The first things, and the most
necessary, are those which I have named. But if with trembling and
lamentation you seek not to fall into that which you avoid, tell me
how you are improving.

Do you then show me your improvement in these things? If I were
talking to an athlete, I should say, "Show me your shoulders"; and
then he might say, "Here are my halteres." You and your halteres
look to that. I should reply, "I wish to see the effect of the
halteres." So, when you say: "Take the treatise on the active
powers, and see how I have studied it." I reply, "Slave, I am not
inquiring about this, but how you exercise pursuit and avoidance,
desire and aversion, how your design and purpose and prepare yourself,
whether conformably to nature or not. If conformably, give me evidence
of it, and I will say that you are making progress: but if not
conformably, be gone, and not only expound your books, but write
such books yourself; and what will you gain by it? Do you not know
that the whole book costs only five denarii? Does then the expounder
seem to be worth more than five denarii? Never, then, look for the
matter itself in one place, and progress toward it in another."

Where then is progress? If any of you, withdrawing himself from
externals, turns to his own will to exercise it and to improve it by
labour, so as to make it conformable to nature, elevated, free,
unrestrained, unimpeded, faithful, modest; and if he has learned
that he who desires or avoids the things which are not in his power
can neither be faithful nor free, but of necessity he must change with
them and be tossed about with them as in a tempest, and of necessity
must subject himself to others who have the power to procure or
prevent what he desires or would avoid; finally, when he rises in
the morning, if he observes and keeps these rules, bathes as a man
of fidelity, eats as a modest man; in like manner, if in every
matter that occurs he works out his chief principles as the runner
does with reference to running, and the trainer of the voice with
reference to the voice- this is the man who truly makes progress,
and this is the man who has not traveled in vain. But if he has
strained his efforts to the practice of reading books, and labours
only at this, and has traveled for this, I tell him to return home
immediately, and not to neglect his affairs there; for this for
which he has traveled is nothing. But the other thing is something, to
study how a man can rid his life of lamentation and groaning, and
saying, "Woe to me," and "wretched that I am," and to rid it also of
misfortune and disappointment and to learn what death is, and exile,