"Control thy passions lest they take vengence on thee"
About this Quote
Austere on the surface, almost parental in its phrasing, this line carries the hard-edged pragmatism that made Epictetus both bracing and strangely modern. The imperative “Control” isn’t a call to repression for its own sake; it’s an engineer’s warning about unstable machinery. In Stoic terms, passions are not just big feelings but runaway judgments - the mind mislabeling what matters, then dragging the body and behavior along for the ride.
The genius of the sentence is the threat it smuggles in: “lest they take vengeance on thee.” Passions are personified as resentful agents, not private weather. That choice weaponizes the reader’s self-interest. Epictetus isn’t asking you to be virtuous because virtue is noble; he’s reminding you that unmanaged anger, lust, envy, or panic will collect a debt with interest. “Vengeance” suggests inevitability and disproportion - you’ll pay later, and you’ll pay more.
Context sharpens the edge. Epictetus was born enslaved and taught in an empire where most people had little control over their circumstances. Stoicism’s central move is to relocate power inward: you may not command events, but you can govern assent, the internal “yes” that turns sensation into suffering. The subtext is political as much as personal: if your passions can be triggered, you can be manipulated. Self-mastery becomes a form of resistance, a way to keep the world from renting space in your head at ruinous rates.
The genius of the sentence is the threat it smuggles in: “lest they take vengeance on thee.” Passions are personified as resentful agents, not private weather. That choice weaponizes the reader’s self-interest. Epictetus isn’t asking you to be virtuous because virtue is noble; he’s reminding you that unmanaged anger, lust, envy, or panic will collect a debt with interest. “Vengeance” suggests inevitability and disproportion - you’ll pay later, and you’ll pay more.
Context sharpens the edge. Epictetus was born enslaved and taught in an empire where most people had little control over their circumstances. Stoicism’s central move is to relocate power inward: you may not command events, but you can govern assent, the internal “yes” that turns sensation into suffering. The subtext is political as much as personal: if your passions can be triggered, you can be manipulated. Self-mastery becomes a form of resistance, a way to keep the world from renting space in your head at ruinous rates.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Discipline |
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