What maxims does Epictetus recommend keeping ready at hand?

Epictetus does not ask his students to invent their own slogans. He hands them three, already written by others, and tells them to keep these ready at hand for every occasion (Handbook 53).

The first comes from Cleanthes: "Conduct me, Jove, and you, Oh Destiny, wherever your decrees have fixed my station." The third is Socrates, from Plato's Crito and Apology: "Oh Crito, if it thus pleases the gods, thus let it be. Anytus and Melitus may kill me indeed, but hurt me they cannot."

A common misreading takes these as maxims about resignation, as if Epictetus wanted his students to go limp before whatever happens and call it wisdom. That misses what each line is actually doing. Cleanthes and Euripides both describe following fate, but Euripides makes the alternative explicit: you can resist, and you will still be dragged along, only now as someone wicked and wretched rather than wise. The lines are not about giving up. They describe two ways of meeting the same outcome, one with your character intact and one without it. Fate moves either way. What is up to you is whether you move with it or against it.

The Socrates line does the harder work of showing why this is not mere submission. Anytus and Melitus, his prosecutors, have the power to kill him. They do not have the power to hurt him. This is the same claim Epictetus makes at the start of the Handbook: things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and our own actions, while body, property, reputation, and command are not in our control (Handbook 1). Socrates' body was never his own to keep safe from Athens. His faculty of choice, his judgments about what is good and bad, was his alone, and no verdict could touch it. That is why he can accept death and still say he has not been harmed. The men who condemned him controlled a fact about his body. They never had access to the part of him that mattered.

Epictetus grounds this same point in a scene he stages with Zeus in the Discourses. Zeus tells Epictetus that he would have made his body and property free from hindrance if that had been possible, but a body bound to earth cannot be immune to externals. What Zeus gives instead is a small portion of himself: the faculty of pursuing and avoiding, of desire and aversion, the faculty of using impressions. Take care of this, Zeus says, and consider it your only possession, and you will never be hindered, never lament, never blame anyone (Discourses I.1). The three maxims in the Handbook are a way of carrying that lesson into the moment when it is hardest to remember.

What changes for someone who actually keeps these maxims at hand is not their circumstances but their target. The person who forgets them measures the day by whether Fate cooperated. The person who remembers them measures the day by whether their judgments, desires, and actions stayed their own, regardless of what Fate did. This is not a trick for feeling calmer. It relocates where you think the good and bad in your life actually live.

A concrete way to use this: before a hard conversation, a diagnosis, or a verdict of any kind, name out loud what part of the outcome is not up to you, and repeat to yourself that whoever yields properly to fate is the one accounted wise. Then ask only whether your own choice, in that moment, was worthy of you.