Page:Discourses of Epictetus volume 2 Oldfather 1928.djvu/59

 It is not an easy thing to prevail upon soft young men; no, and you can't catch soft cheese on a fishhook either—but the gifted young men, even if you try to turn them away, take hold of reason all the more firmly. And so also Rufus for the most part tried to dissuade men, using such efforts to dissuade as a means of discriminating between those who were gifted and those who were not. For he used to say, "Just as a stone, even if you throw it upwards, will fall downwards to earth by virtue of its very constitution, so is also the gifted man; the more one beats him back, the more he inclines toward his natural object." 



the Imperial Bailiff, who was an Epicurean, came to visit him, Epictetus said: It is proper for us laymen to make inquiry of you philosophers what the best thing in the world is—just as those who have come to a strange town make inquiry of the citizens and people who are familiar with the place—so that, having learned what it is, we may go in quest of it ourselves and behold it, as do strangers with the sights in the cities. Now that three things belong to man, soul, and body, and things external, hardly anyone denies; all you have to do, then, is to 49