Echo
What is up to us
A long argument about the small territory a person actually governs. The Stoics draw the border. Later writers, in worse centuries, test whether the border holds.
1 · Epictetus
Of things, some are in our power, and others are not.Aurelius, emperor and reader of Epictetus, takes the same border indoors.
2 · Marcus Aurelius
Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself.Frankl writes after the camps, where retreat was not available and the last freedom still was.
3 · Viktor Frankl
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.Nietzsche had already asked what that freedom is for. A why, he thought, organizes the how.
4 · Friedrich Nietzsche
If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how.