Meditations IX.13

This day have I got me out of all trouble, or rather have cast out all trouble, for it was not from without, but within, in my own imagination.²⁵

• 25.v. 2; viii. 40; xii. 22. Compare Montaigne, i. 40 (Florio’s translation): “Men, saith an ancient Greek sentence, are tormented by the opinions they have of things and not the things themselves. . . . If evil have no entrance into us but by our judgment, it seemeth that it lieth in our power either to contemne or turn them to our good. . . . If that which we call evil and torment be neither torment nor evil, but that our fancy only gives it that quality, it is in us to change it.”

  The chapter of Montaigne cited is titled “That the taste of good and evil depends in large part on the opinion we have of them”; the “ancient Greek sentence” he quotes is the fifth chapter of Epictetus’s Manual.