A Quote by Epictetus

Fortune is an evil chain to the body, and vice to the soul. — © Epictetus
Fortune is an evil chain to the body, and vice to the soul.

Quote Topics

The chief evil with relation to the body is love for the body and pitying it. This takes away all the soul's authority over the body and makes the soul the slave of the body. And on the contrary, one who does not spare the body will not be disturbed in whatever he does by apprehensions born of blind love of life. How fortunate is one who is trained to this from childhood!
The soul is bound to the body by a chain of desires, temptations, troubles and worries, and it is trying to free itself. If you keep tugging at that chain which is holding you to mortal consciousness, some day an invisible Divine Hand will intervene and snap it apart and you will be free.
In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his sense a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, his fame doubtful. In short, all that is body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors.
We ourselves, though we're guilty of every sin, are not just a work of God: we're image. Yet we have cut ourselves off from our Creator in both soul and body. Did we get eyes to serve lust, the tongue to speak evil, ears to hear evil, a throat for gluttony, a stomach to be gluttony's ally, hands to do violence, genitals for unchaste excesses, feet for an erring life? Was the soul put in the body to think up traps, fraud, and injustice? I don't think so.
The soul is the ego, the ‘I,’ or the self, and it contains our consciousness. It also animates our body. That’s why when the soul leaves the body, the body becomes a corpse. The soul is immaterial and distinct from the body.
As material fortune is associated with the properties of the body, so honor belongs to those of the soul.
In bad or corrupted natures the body will often appear to rule over the soul, because they are in an evil and unnatural condition. At all events we may firstly observe in living creatures both a despotical and a constitutional rule; for the soul rules the body with a despotical rule, whereas the intellect rules the appetites with a constitutional and royal rule. And it is clear that the rule of the soul over the body, and of the mind and the rational element over the passionate, is natural and expedient; whereas the equality of the two or the rule of the inferior is always hurtful.
The soul loves the body. And consider too how it is that the body is more in the soul than the soul is in the body.
Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love
[T]hro? this Air, this Ocean, and this Earth, All Nature quick, and bursting into birth. Above, how high progressive life may go? Around how wide? how deep extend below? Vast Chain of Being! which from God began, Ethereal Essence, Spirit, Substance, Man, Beast, Bird, Fish, Insect! what no Eye can see, No Glass can reach! from Infinite to Thee! From Thee to Nothing.... From Nature?s Chain whatever Link you strike, Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.... All are but parts of one stupendous Whole: Whose Body Nature is, and God the Soul.
God chose us to live both in body and in soul, but the body functions for the sake of the soul more than the soul functions for the body.
Although one soul lives in the whole body, and all the body's members are controlled by one soul, still the whole body and the whole soul and the parts of the universe are vivified by a certain total spirit.
Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
The body knows no pain, not like the soul. At least a nerve has limits, a body part a name. But the soul... the soul... There is no bandage - even crying is in vain.
The soul is something which contains the body. The body doesn't contain the soul. The soul, if we put it into modern language, is the entire complex of relationships in whose context this organism exists.
It is good reason, that man consisting of two parts, the soul and body, the body only should not take up all, but the soul should be remembered too. Enjoying is the body's part, and well-doing is the soul's; your souls are suitors to you to remember them, that is, to remember well-doing, which is the soul's portion.
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