“You can bind up my leg, but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice.”
EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 1.1.23
The author again turns to the story of Captain James Stockdale in today’s entry in The Daily Stoic. Holiday highlights how Stockdale and other prisoners of war suffered through some of the worst abuses and cruelties imaginable, but they did not yield their principles. They focused on what they could control, and held fast to what they believed to be right.
And that’s the simple wisdom in today’s quote: you can suffer all kinds of hardships and difficulties, trials and tribulations, but nothing can make you sacrifice your principles except for yourself. You have the ultimate freedom of choice over your actions, and you have the power to hold fast to the right and good decisions you know you should make.
Nothing that anyone in life throws at you can take away your freedom of thought, your freedom of mind. You can be cornered or even captured — but freedom of choice overcomes all these things in the end, because reasoned choice is invincible.
