Stoic meditation of the day: On the importance of refining our faculty of judgment.

“It’s a general principle, in fact, that the type of result depends on the type of cause. So from this day on, if we ever do something wrong, we’ll attribute it entirely to the judgment that led us to act as we did, and we’ll put more effort into eliminating and extirpating this judgment than we put into ridding our bodies of tumors and growths. But by the same token, we’ll also acknowledge judgments to be the cause of anything we do right. We’ll stop blaming our neighbors, wives, and children for any of the bad things that happen to us, because of our conviction that it’s judging things in a certain way that causes us to carry out the corresponding actions. And it is we who are responsible for judging something to be so or not so, not anything outside us.” (Epictetus, Discourses 1.11.34-37)