Discourses, To Those Who Fear Want

Epictetus — The Slave

Instead, you act like everything in your life is fine and secure. You focus on the advanced topic of keeping things unchanged. But what are you trying to keep unchanged? Your cowardice. Your petty spirit. Your worship of rich people. Your desires that never get satisfied. Your attempts to avoid things that fail anyway. You're anxious to protect these worthless traits. Shouldn't you have gained something valuable from philosophy first, and then worked to protect that? Who builds a wall around nothing? What doorkeeper guards a door that doesn't exist?

Epictetus — The Slave Original

But as if all your affairs were well and secure, you have been resting on the third topic, that of things being unchanged, in order that you may possess unchanged—what? cowardice, mean spirit, the admiration of the rich, desire without attaining any end, and avoidance which fails in the attempt? About security in these things you have been anxious. Ought you not to have gained something in addition from reason, and then to have protected this with security? And whom did you ever see building a battlement all around and encircling it with a wall? And what doorkeeper is placed with no door to watch?