Epictetus, Enchiridion, chapter 5 (trans. Thomas Wentworth Higginson)
This line comes from chapter five of the Enchiridion, the short handbook of Stoic advice compiled by Arrian from the teaching of Epictetus in the second century. The handbook deliberately avoids metaphysics and collects practical precepts, aimed at how philosophy is applied to an ordinary day. The chapter's claim is that people are disturbed not by events but by the judgments they make about them, with death as the example: the thing itself is not terrible, since otherwise it would have appeared so to everyone, and what is terrible is the judgment that it is. The practical instruction that follows is to look for the cause of distress in one's own opinion rather than in the event. The passage is the acknowledged ancestor of cognitive behavioural therapy, which is why this vault cites it. It is a philosophical text rather than evidence about what actually reduces distress.
This line comes from chapter five of the Enchiridion, the short handbook of Stoic advice compiled by Arrian from the teaching of Epictetus in the second century. The handbook deliberately avoids metaphysics and collects practical precepts, aimed at how philosophy is applied to an ordinary day. The chapter's claim is that people are disturbed not by events but by the judgments they make about them, with death as the example: the thing itself is not terrible, since otherwise it would have appeared so to everyone, and what is terrible is the judgment that it is. The practical instruction that follows is to look for the cause of distress in one's own opinion rather than in the event. The passage is the acknowledged ancestor of cognitive behavioural therapy, which is why this vault cites it. It is a philosophical text rather than evidence about what actually reduces distress.
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What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
Epictetus, Enchiridion 5. "Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them."
Where we use it
- 2,500 Years, One Good Study, Why We Exist / Endure
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