2018-02-24

"on freedom"

"And you'll realize, as Cleanthes used to say, that what philosophers say may be contrary to expectation, but not to reason. For you will learn by experience that it's true: the things that men admire and work so hard to get prove useless to them once they're theirs. Meanwhile people to whom such things are still denied come to imagine that everything good will be theirs if only they could acquire them. Then they get them: and their longing is unchanged, their anxiety is unchanged, their disgust is no less, and they still long for whatever is lacking. Freedom is not achieved by satisfying desire, but by eliminating it."

--Epictetus