“Since it is Reason which shapes and regulates all other things, it ought not itself to be left in disorder.”

— Epictetus

Book I, ch. 17.
Discourses

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Since it is Reason which shapes and regulates all other things, it ought not itself to be left in disorder." by Epictetus?

Epictetus photo

Epictetus 175

philosopher from Ancient Greece 50–138

Related quotes

“To all this, someone is sure to object that life ought to subject itself to reason, to which we will reply that nobody ought to do what he is unable to do, and life cannot subject itself to reason.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VI : In the Depths of the Abyss
Context: To all this, someone is sure to object that life ought to subject itself to reason, to which we will reply that nobody ought to do what he is unable to do, and life cannot subject itself to reason. "Ought, therefore can," some Kantian will retort. To which we shall demur: "Cannot, therefore ought not." And life cannot submit itself to reason, because the end of life is living and not understanding.

“But Chrysippus, Posidonius, Zeno, and Boëthus say, that all things are produced by fate. And fate is a connected cause of existing things, or the reason according to which the world is regulated.”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Zeno, 74.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 7: The Stoics

“It is a base thing for the countenance to be obedient and to regulate and compose itself as the mind commands, and for the mind not to be regulated and composed by itself.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

VII, 37
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VII

“Lord Peter Wimsey: I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.”

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Gaudy Night (1936)

“My idea is, that if capital and labor are left alone they will mutually regulate each other. People who think they can regulate all mankind and get wrong ideas which they believe to be panaceas for every ill cause much trouble to both employers and employees by their interference.”

Jay Gould (1836–1892) American businessman

Testimony to the New York Senate Committee on Labor and Education"
Jay Gould : A Character Sketch (1893)

“And since these things are so, we must suppose that there are contained many things and of all sorts in the things that are uniting, seeds of all things, with all sorts of shapes and colours and savours”

Anaxagoras (-500–-428 BC) ancient Greek philosopher

Frag. B 4, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.

“After these matters we ought perhaps next to discuss pleasure. For it is thought to be most intimately connected with our human nature, which is the reason why in educating the young we steer them by the rudders of pleasure and pain; it is thought, too, that to enjoy the things we ought and to hate the things we ought has the greatest bearing on virtue of character. For these things extend right through life, with a weight and power of their own in respect both to virtue and to the happy life, since men choose what is pleasant and avoid what is painful; and such things, it will be thought, we should least of all omit to discuss, especially since they admit of much dispute.”

Aristotle book Nicomachean Ethics

Book X, 1172a.17
Nicomachean Ethics

“Everything persecutes him; all things go against the guilty. No calamity by itself. Everything went badly with me, when I harboured revenge, but [I] changed, and left everything in God's hands: since then all happily.”

Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist

Nemesis Divina (1734)

“All things that are in the world are linked together, one way or the other. Not a single thing comes into being without some relationship to every other thing. Scientific intellect thinks here in terms of natural laws of necessary causality; mythico-poetic imagination perceives an organic, living connection; philosophic reason contemplates an absolute One. But on a more essential level, a system of circuminsession has to be seen here, according to which, on the field of Śūnyatā, all things are in a process of becoming master and servant to one another. In this system, each thing is itself in not being itself, and is not itself in being itself. Its being is illusion in its truth and truth in its illusion. This may sound strange the first time one hears it, but in fact it enables us for the first time to conceive of a force by virtue of which all things are gathered together and brought into relationship with one another, a force which, since ancient times, has gone by the name of "nature"”

Keiji Nishitani book Religion and Nothingness

physis
Source: Religion and Nothingness (1983), p. 149

“Communism is like an autoimmune disorder; it doesn't do the killing itself, but it weakens the system so much that the victim is left helpless and unable to fight off anything else.”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

Source: 2010s, Winter is Coming (2015), p. 33

Related topics