Discourses and Selected Writings
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  • Published: 6 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241764060
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 416
  • RRP: $37.00

Discourses and Selected Writings

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29 Sep 2008
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6 Jan 2026
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25 Feb 2021
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A beautiful edition of the great Stoic philosopher's writings, designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith and new to the Penguin Pocket Hardbacks series

'I must die. But must I die bawling?'

Epictetus, a Greek Stoic and freed slave, ran a thriving philosophy school in Nicopolis in the early second century CE. His animated discussions were celebrated for their rhetorical wizardry and were written down by Arrian, his most famous pupil. The Discourses argue that happiness lies in learning to perceive exactly what is in our power to change and what is not, and in embracing our fate to live in harmony with god and nature. In this personal, practical guide to the ethics of Stoicism and moral self-improvement, Epictetus tackles questions of freedom and imprisonment, illness and fear, family, friendship and love.

This is a Penguin Pocket Hardback edition, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Robert Dobbin's modern and lively translation is accompanied by an introduction and notes.
  • Published: 6 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241764060
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 416
  • RRP: $37.00
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Pliny the Younger
The Enneads
Plotinus
The Age of Alexander
Plutarch
Fall Of The Roman Republic
Plutarch
The Makers of Rome
Plutarch
On Sparta
Plutarch
The Rise And Fall of Athens
Plutarch
The Rise of Rome
Plutarch
Rome in Crisis
Plutarch
The Portable Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings
Edgar Allan Poe
The Rise of the Roman Empire
Polybius
The Master of Ballantrae
Robert Louis Stevenson
The Rape of the Lock and Other Major Writings
Alexander Pope
Manon Lescaut
Abbe Prevost
The Secret History
Procopius
Fourteen Byzantine Rulers
Michael Psellus
Eugene Onegin
Alexander Pushkin
Novels, Tales, Journeys
Alexander Pushkin
The Queen of Spades and Other Stories
Alexander Pushkin
The Works of the Gawain Poet
AD Putter, Myra Stokes
The All-Pervading Melodious Drumbeat
Senge Ra Yeshe, Ra Yeshe Senge, Yeshe, Senge, Ra
Iphigenia, Phaedra, Athaliah
Jean Racine
The Italian
Ann Radcliffe
The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ann Radcliffe
Ten Days That Shook the World
John Reed
Clarissa, or the History of A Young Lady
Samuel Richardson
Pamela
Samuel Richardson
The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta
John Rollin Ridge
The Notebooks Of Malte Laurids Briggs
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Letters to a Young Poet
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Selected Poems And Letters
Arthur Rimbaud
Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not)
Jose Rizal
The Pre-Raphaelites: From Rossetti to Ruskin
Dinah Roe
The Dhammapada
Valerie Roebuck
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
John Romer
Tomorrow Is Now
Eleanor Rossevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt
Complete Poems
Christina Rossetti
Selected Poems: Rossetti
Christina Rossetti
Cyrano de Bergerac
Edmond Rostand
The Confessions
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A Discourse on Inequality
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Of The Social Contract and Other Political Writings
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Reveries of the Solitary Walker
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Social Contract
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Selected Poems
Rumi
Spiritual Verses
The Jalaluddin Rumi
Unto This Last and Other Writings
John Ruskin
The Case Against Satan
Ray Russell
Haunted Castles
Ray Russell
Venus in Furs
Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
The 120 Days of Sodom
The Marquis de Sade
Catiline's War, The Jugurthine War, Histories
Sallust
The Epic of Gilgamesh
N. K. Sandars
Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments of Sappho
SAPPHO
On The Aesthetic Education Of Man
Friedrich Schiller
Essays and Aphorisms
Arthur Schopenhauer
Black No More
George S. Schuyler
Ivanhoe
Sir Walter Scott, Walter Scott
Rob Roy
Walter Scott
Waverley
Walter Scott
Dialogues and Letters
Seneca
Four Tragedies And Octavia
Seneca
Letters from a Stoic
Seneca
Phaedra and Other Plays
Seneca
All's Well That Ends Well
William Shakespeare
Antony and Cleopatra
William Shakespeare
As You Like It
William Shakespeare
The Comedy of Errors
William Shakespeare
Coriolanus
William Shakespeare
Cymbeline
William Shakespeare
Four Tragedies
William Shakespeare
Hamlet
William Shakespeare
Henry VI Part One
William Shakespeare
Henry VI Part Three
William Shakespeare
Henry VI Part Two
William Shakespeare
Henry VIII
William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar
William Shakespeare
King Lear
William Shakespeare
Love's Labour's Lost
William Shakespeare
Macbeth
William Shakespeare
Measure for Measure
William Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice
William Shakespeare
The Merry Wives of Windsor
William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare
Much Ado About Nothing
William Shakespeare
Othello
William Shakespeare
Pericles
William Shakespeare
Richard II
William Shakespeare
Richard III
William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare
The Taming of the Shrew
William Shakespeare
The Tempest
William Shakespeare
Timon of Athens
William Shakespeare
Titus Andronicus
William Shakespeare
Troilus and Cressida
William Shakespeare
Twelfth Night
William Shakespeare
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
William Shakespeare
The Two Noble Kinsmen
William Shakespeare
The Winter's Tale
William Shakespeare
Henry V
William Shakespeare
Pygmalion
Bernard Shaw
Man and Superman
George Bernard Shaw
Saint Joan
George Bernard Shaw
Mary and Maria, Matilda
Mary Shelley
Selected Poems and Prose
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The School for Scandal and Other Plays
Richard Sheridan
The Purple Cloud
M P Shiel
The Pillow Book
Sei Shonagon
Roots of Yoga
Mark Singleton, James Mallinson, James Mallinson, Mark Singleton
Medieval Writings on Secular Women
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Adam Smith
The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith
The Little Demon
Fyodor Sologub, Ronald Wilks
The Talmud
Norman Solomon
Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio
Pu Songling
The Theban Plays
Sophocles Sophocles
The Three Theban Plays
Sophocles
Botchan
Natsume Soseki
Kokoro
Natsume Soseki
Kusamakura
Natsume Soseki
Sanshiro
Natsume Soseki
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A. C. Spearing
The Faerie Queene
Edmund Spenser
Ethics
Benedict Spinoza
The Charterhouse of Parma
Stendhal
Love
Stendhal
The Red and the Black
Stendhal
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Laurence Sterne
A Sentimental Journey
Laurence Sterne
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Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson
Dracula
Bram Stoker
The Penguin Book of English Song
Richard Stokes
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Stowe
Tristan with the 'Tristran' of Thomas
Gottfried Von Strassburg
The Mysteries of Paris
Eugène Sue, Eugene Sue
The Art of War
Sun-tzu
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John Sutherland
Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift
A Modest Proposal and Other Writings
Jonathan Swift
Agricola and Germania
Tacitus
Annals
Tacitus
The Annals of Imperial Rome
Tacitus
Selected Poems
Rabindranath Tagore
Beauty and the Beast
MARIA TATAR
Idylls Of The King
Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson
Selected Poems: Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Comedies
Terence
My Inventions And Other Writings
Nikola Tesla
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
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The Duke Of Wellington
Arabian Sands
Wilfred Thesiger
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Wilfred Thesiger
The Portable Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau, Henry Thoreau
Walden and Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau
History of the Peloponnesian War
THUCYDIDES
The Blacker the Berry . . .
Wallace Thurman
The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse
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Democracy in America
Alexis Tocqueville
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
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A Confession and Other Religious Writings
Leo Tolstoy
The Cossacks and Other Stories
Leo Tolstoy
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Leo Tolstoy
How Much Land Does a Man Need? & Other Stories
Leo Tolstoy
The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories
Leo Tolstoy
Master and Man and Other Stories
Leo Tolstoy
Resurrection
Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
What is Art?
Leo Tolstoy
Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author
Edward John Trelawny
Can You Forgive Her?
Anthony Trollope
Doctor Thorne
Anthony Trollope
Framley Parsonage
Anthony Trollope
The Last Chronicle of Barset
Anthony Trollope
Phineas Redux
Anthony Trollope
The Prime Minister
Anthony Trollope
The Small House at Allington
Anthony Trollope
The Warden
Anthony Trollope
The Way We Live Now
Anthony Trollope
Arthurian Romances
Chretien de Troyes
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Ivan Turgenev
Sketches from a Hunter's Album
Ivan Turgenev
Life on the Mississippi
Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain
A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court
Mark Twain
The Prince and the Pauper
Mark Twain
A Tramp Abroad
Mark Twain
Chronicles of the First Crusade
Christopher Tyerman
The Book of Chuang Tzu
Chuang Tzu
Tao Te Ching
Lao Tzu
The Kabbalistic Tradition
Alan Unterman
The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent Van Gogh
One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story: 2
The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers
Hollis Robbins
Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky
Bryan Karetnyk
Lives of the Artists
Giorgio Vasari
The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (7th Edition)
Geza Vermes
Around the World in Eighty Days
Jules Verne
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Jules Verne
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Jules Verne
Chronicles of the Crusades
Joinville and Villehardouin
On Architecture
Vitruvius
Treatise On Toleration
Voltaire
Elective Affinities
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Italian Journey 1786-1788
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Maxims and Reflections
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales
Franz Xaver Von Schonwerth, von Schonwerth, Franz Xaver
Devil on the Cross
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
The Malay Archipelago
Alfred Russel Wallace
The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole
Penguin Book Of First World War Poetry
Matthew George Walter
The Desert Fathers
Benedicta Ward
Poems
Wang Wei
The First Men in the Moon
H. G. Wells
The Invisible Man
H. G. Wells
The Island of Doctor Moreau
H.G. Wells
Kipps
H. G. Wells
A Modern Utopia
H. G. Wells
The Shape of Things to Come
H. G. Wells
A Short History of the World
H. G. Wells
The Sleeper Awakes
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
H. G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
H. G. Wells
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
The Custom of the Country
Edith Wharton
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton
Summer
Edith Wharton
The Natural History of Selborne
Gilbert White
The Complete Poems
Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman
The Complete Short Fiction
Oscar Wilde
De Profundis And Other Prison Writings
Oscar Wilde
The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays
Oscar Wilde
The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose
Oscar Wilde
Writings From Ancient Egypt
Toby Wilkinson
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary Wollstonecraft
Night and Day
Virginia Woolf
The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry
Jonathan Wordsworth
The Prelude
William Wordsworth
Selected Poems
William Wordsworth
Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann
Various
Conversations of Socrates
Xenophon
Hiero The Tyrant And Other Treatises
Xenophon
A History of My Times
Xenophon
The Persian Expedition
Xenophon
The Story of the Stone
Cao Xueqin
The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China
Lu Xun
We
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The Book of Master Mo
Mo Zi
Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies' Delight)
Emile Zola
The Beast Within
Emile Zola
The Debacle
Emile Zola
The Drinking Den
Emile Zola
Nana
Emile Zola
Thérèse Raquin
Emile Zola
Germinal
Emile Zola

About the author

Epictetus

Epictetus (c. 55-135 AD) was a teacher and Greco-Roman philosopher. Originally a slave from Hierapolis in Anatolia (modern Turkey), he was owned for a time by a prominent freedman at the court of the emperor Nero. After gaining his freedom he moved to Nicopolis on the Adriatic coast of Greece and opened a school of philosophy there. His informal lectures (the Discourses) were transcribed and published by his student Arrian, who also composed a digest of Epictetus' teaching known as the Manual (or Enchiridion). Late in life Epictetus retired from teaching, adopted an orphan child, and lived out his remaining years in domestic obscurity. His thought owes most to Stoicism, but also reflects the influence of other philosophers, Plato and Socrates in particular.

Also by Epictetus

Whatever is Rational is Tolerable
How To Be a Stoic
Of Human Freedom
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