Twelve Books of Letters and Lectures

...man could joke so charmingly? Indeed, we refrained from our weapons, both because he had threatened that he would return the injury, and because his skin had grown so calloused that it would not admit such light blows. Therefore, we received the old man with the veneration we owed; who, as soon as he sat down among us, began to philosophize on morals, and that indeed in Latin—not so much because he was among Latins (for there were those in that gathering who knew Greek), but because, by your kindness, he himself spoke more splendidly in Latin. Nor did he waste his effort, since he did not stop speaking until he had made us Stoics out of Peripatetics, and we all approved that Apathia; so that it may now be seen that men who a little before were delicate have now been made the most enduring of all; we who indeed can be provoked by others, but harmed only by ourselves; who never resist fate, and who wish those things which are not our own to happen just as the gods will; and we neither blame nor accuse them, we grieve for nothing, we demand nothing; we know not how to serve or be conquered: Let us philosophize in deed, not in speech. And we who are novices, let us watch ourselves as adversaries; let us neglect rather than reject the opinion of others about us, and other things of that kind which are external. Let us care for the day, as travelers do for an inn; finally, let us possess those things, not be possessed by them. Let us love silence, lest anything undigested be vomited out; and let others rarely move us to laughter, and let us never move others; and, to [embrace] the whole of Epictetus in a single word