If you wish your children and your wife and your
friends to live forever, you are foolish; for you wish
things to be in your power which are not so; and
what belongs to others to be your own. So likewise,
if you wish your servant to be without fault, you are
foolish; for you wish vice not to be vice, but something else. But if you wish not to be disappointed
in your desires, that is in your own power. Exercise,
[p. 2222]
therefore, what is in your power. A man's master is
he who is able to confer or remove whatever that man
seeks or shuns. Whoever then would be free, let him
wish nothing, let him decline nothing, which depends
on others; else he must necessarily be a slave.
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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