"Not every difficult and dangerous thing is suitable for training, but only that which is conducive to success in achieving the object of our effort"
About this Quote
Austerity isn’t automatically virtue; Epictetus is warning against the seductive glamour of hardship. In a culture that can mistake suffering for seriousness, his line draws a clean Stoic boundary: difficulty is not a credential. If the “dangerous” thing doesn’t serve the aim you’ve chosen, it’s not training, it’s theater.
The intent is practical, almost clinical. Epictetus treats life like a discipline with an objective function: what you practice should reliably improve your capacity to meet the task. That frames “training” not as self-punishment but as calibration. The subtext is a jab at ego-driven asceticism - the impulse to pick the harshest regimen because it feels morally impressive, or because it provides a story about grit. He’s not anti-struggle; he’s anti-misdirected struggle. The Stoic target is prohairesis, your faculty of choice. Training is supposed to strengthen judgment, endurance, and ethical clarity, not feed vanity.
Context matters. Epictetus, once enslaved and later a teacher in a Roman world obsessed with status, watches people confuse external trials with inner progress. Stoicism redirects attention from what happens to you to how you respond. So the quote smuggles a bigger claim: the worth of a practice is measured by whether it makes you better at the one job you actually control - acting in accordance with reason toward your purpose.
It also reads like an early critique of performative “hard things,” the ancient cousin of hustle culture. Choose the hard path that works; refuse the hard path that merely hurts.
The intent is practical, almost clinical. Epictetus treats life like a discipline with an objective function: what you practice should reliably improve your capacity to meet the task. That frames “training” not as self-punishment but as calibration. The subtext is a jab at ego-driven asceticism - the impulse to pick the harshest regimen because it feels morally impressive, or because it provides a story about grit. He’s not anti-struggle; he’s anti-misdirected struggle. The Stoic target is prohairesis, your faculty of choice. Training is supposed to strengthen judgment, endurance, and ethical clarity, not feed vanity.
Context matters. Epictetus, once enslaved and later a teacher in a Roman world obsessed with status, watches people confuse external trials with inner progress. Stoicism redirects attention from what happens to you to how you respond. So the quote smuggles a bigger claim: the worth of a practice is measured by whether it makes you better at the one job you actually control - acting in accordance with reason toward your purpose.
It also reads like an early critique of performative “hard things,” the ancient cousin of hustle culture. Choose the hard path that works; refuse the hard path that merely hurts.
Quote Details
| Topic | Training & Practice |
|---|
More Quotes by Epictetus
Add to List
