Ten Fake Quotes Misattributed To Stoic Philosopher Epictetus | Gregory Sadler Calling Them Out!
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Fake quotes attributed to famous authors are all over the internet. And they're bad business for brains! Don't be a sucker for these by believing them uncritically, and don't repost quotes you're not sure are actually by the thinker they're attributed to, or you're making yourself part of the problem
In this video, I identify ten fake quotes that are not by the author they are often attributed to, Epictetus, but which are attributed to him in quote pages, images, and videos. I discuss where the quote originates from (when we know), and why each of them is something Epictetus wouldn't have said, based on what we know he did say in his existing texts. A number of these turn out to be from one particular book, Sharon Lebell's book The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness
Here are the fake quotes we're calling out in this video:
1. "The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests" - the real source: Charles de Saint-Évremond, An Essay on the Vindication of Epicurus and his Doctrine"
2. "Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to" - the real source: Epicurus, by way of Lactantius, On The Anger of God
3. "Circumstances don’t make the man, they only reveal him to himself" - the real source: James Allen’s As Man Thinketh
4. "Nature has given to men one tongue, but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak" - from George Long translation of Fragments (coming from Stobaeus), but actually from a fragment attributed to Zeno of Citium (Anthologus, 3.36.19)
5. "He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at" - original source unknown
6. "The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best - a gloss on Epictetus' Enchiridion from Sharon Lebell’s The Art of Living
7. "Caretake this moment. Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed. Quit evasions. Stop giving yourself needless trouble. It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now" - a gloss on Epictetus' Enchiridion from Sharon Lebell’s The Art of Living
8. "From this instant on, vow to stop disappointing yourself. Separate yourself from the mob. Decide to be extraordinary and do what you need to do-now." - a gloss on Epictetus' Enchiridion from Sharon Lebell’s The Art of Living. But this also reads like the famous mountain-climber Edmund Hillary’s supposed statement "People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things", which is from a Rolex ad
9. If you want to live a wise life, live it on your own terms and in your own eyes" - a gloss on Epictetus' Enchiridion from Sharon Lebell’s The Art of Living.
10. "Small-minded people blame others. Average people blame themselves. The wise see all blame as foolishness" - an abbreviation of Lebell’s mistranslation of Epictetus' Enchiridion in her The Art of Living: “Small-minded people habitually reproach others for their own misfortunes. Average people reproach themselves. Those are are dedicated to a life of wisdom understand that the impulse to blame something or someone is foolishness”
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Пікірлер: 22
"Do not trust Internet quotes" -Epictetus
Seen so many guys from Brazilian Jiu Jitsu groups erroneously misquote Stoic Philosophers. I often sit there with a suspicion they do not even read Philosophical Classics, only skim through what they heard, seen, or read off of the internet, than post onto whatever platform they use for likes and validation. They are not the only ones though, even on KZread there are channels that grossly misinterpret philosophers.
@GregoryBSadler
11 ай бұрын
Yes, there's a lot of that mindless recycling quotes going on out there
Thanks for a great video.
@GregoryBSadler
11 ай бұрын
You're welcome
Okay, so the way I remembered it for chapter 11 was: "A man who has yet to learn blames others A man who is in the process of learning blames himself A man who has learned blames nothing." I must have gotten wires crossed, because I misattributed that to Zeno.
@GregoryBSadler
2 ай бұрын
No reason to remember it. You can find Epictetus' text online easily, in both English translations and the original Greek.
As Voltaire said, "A philosopher is only as good as his cat videos." Captain Kirk never said, "Beam me up, Scotty" and James Cagney never said, "You dirty rat." But they capture the feel of their attribution and are some things that they could have said. Sometimes a spurious quote is a mangled mash-up, but does capture the essence of its purported source. More often though, it's just some words someone made up and then went thumbing for a source to hang them on. The ideal source is well respected but seldom actually read, at least in full. (Franklin, Lincoln and Churchill are classic examples.) No one is going to quote a spurious Beatles lyric because everyone knows the Beatles' songs. But if it's attributed to Theognis or Marcus Aurelius, and through the added veil of multiple translations, ya think, "Yeah, well, maybe he did say that..."
@GregoryBSadler
11 ай бұрын
None of these are really cases of "captur[ing] the essence" of Epictetus, I'm afraid
4:24 I assume you mean Zeno of Citium not Zeno of Elea (or the many other Zenos for that matter).
@GregoryBSadler
11 ай бұрын
That goes without saying, given the context, buddy
I’m a fan of Sharon Lebell, and I can’t speak for her, but I don’t think she’d support these quotes of her glosses getting attributed directly to Epictetus. Whether you like her work or not, she’s never been shy about her revisionist tendencies.
@GregoryBSadler
11 ай бұрын
Yes, I can't imagine she'd want people mindlessly recycling quotes from her book as if they were directly from Epictetus
Not surprising that these come from the internet community. The business model for much of social media is patterned after dynamics of gossip. Gossip can be malignant, benign or even helpful. Perhaps these are the product of the enthusiasm of finding a philosophy you can relate to and offers guidance.
@GregoryBSadler
11 ай бұрын
Yes, quotes uncritically sourced proliferate online. Before that. it was for about a century and a half in quotes books
@user-jf3hh4xr4n
11 ай бұрын
@@GregoryBSadler Thanks for the quick response, I've seen something similar in words that have had their definitions repurposed.
@user-jf3hh4xr4n
11 ай бұрын
A friend of mine coined a term for words that end up with a meaning that is diametrically opposite of its implied meaning, "contra-logism".
I kinda hate how mainstream and popular this philosophy has gotten. Now when you tell people you read stoic works, they think of you as some emotionless sociopathic asshole instead of someone who has a genuine love for the philosophy
@GregoryBSadler
11 ай бұрын
I guess you can show them over time by your responses and behavior that there's a difference between stoicism and Stoicism
Why would Epictetus referenced freaking PILOTS in his writings?
@GregoryBSadler
11 ай бұрын
Pilot means the person who directs a ship. Air pilot came from that.