Discourses, On Friendship — In Plain English

Epictetus — The Slave

Everyone enjoys reading a book more when it's written clearly. So everyone listens more carefully when someone speaks with the right words. Don't say there's no skill in how you express yourself. That claim comes from someone who's either ungrateful or cowardly. Ungrateful because they dismiss God's gifts — like someone who would throw away their eyesight or hearing. Did God give you eyes for no reason? Did he put such a powerful and clever spirit in them for nothing — one that can see far and make sense of what you're looking at? What messenger moves as fast and stays as alert as your vision? Did he make the air useless when he made it so effective that your sight can travel through it? Did he create light for no purpose, when without it nothing else would matter?

Epictetus — The Slave Original

Every man will read a book with more pleasure or even with more ease, if it is written in fairer characters. Therefore every man will also listen more readily to what is spoken, if it is signified by appropriate and becoming words. We must not say then that there is no faculty of expression: for this affirmation is the characteristic of an impious and also of a timid man. Of an impious man, because he undervalues the gifts which come from God, just as if he would take away the commodity of the power of vision, or hearing, or of seeing. Has then God given you eyes to no purpose? and to no purpose has he infused into them a spirit so strong and of such skilful contrivance as to reach a long way and to fashion the forms of things which are seen? What messenger is so swift and vigilant? And to no purpose has he made the interjacent atmosphere so efficacious and elastic that the vision penetrates through the atmosphere which is in a manner moved? And to no purpose has he made light, without the presence of which there would be no use in any other thing?

Epictetus — The Slave

If you seriously want to be a friend or have a real friend, you need to cut out these toxic opinions. Hate them. Drive them from your mind. When you do this, you'll stop blaming yourself. You won't fight with yourself. You won't keep changing your mind or torturing yourself. And with another person who thinks like you, you'll be a complete and total friend. You'll also be patient with people who think differently. You'll be kind and gentle with them. You'll forgive them because they're ignorant and mistaken about the most important things. But you won't be harsh with anyone. You'll remember Plato's teaching: every mind loses truth against its will. If you can't do this, you can still act like friends in other ways — drink together, live together, travel together. You might even be born from the same parents. But snakes are born from the same parents too. Neither they nor you will be true friends as long as you hold onto these brutal, damaging opinions.

Epictetus — The Slave Original

And let every man among you who has seriously resolved either to be a friend himself or to have another for his friend, cut out these opinions, hate them, drive them from his soul. And thus first of all he will not reproach himself, he will not be at variance with himself, he will not change his mind, he will not torture himself. In the next place, to another also, who is like himself, he will be altogether and completely a friend. But he will bear with the man who is unlike himself, he will be kind to him, gentle, ready to pardon on account of his ignorance, on account of his being mistaken in things of the greatest importance; but he will be harsh to no man, being well convinced of Plato's doctrine that every mind is deprived of truth unwillingly. If you cannot do this, yet you can do in all other respects as friends do, drink together, and lodge together, and sail together, and you may be born of the same parents, for snakes also are: but neither will they be friends, nor you, so long as you retain these bestial and cursed opinions.