"I find myself not quite free, nor yet quite in bondage to faults which I feared and hated. I am in a state, not the worst indeed, but very querulous and uncomfortable, neither well nor ill. It is a weakness of the mind that sways between the two, that will neither bravely turn to right nor to wrong. Things disturb me, though they do not alter my principles. I think of public life; something worries me, and I fall back into the life of leisure, to be pricked to the will to act by reading some brave words or seeing some fine example. I beg you, if you have any remedy to stay my fluctuation of mind, count me worthy to owe you peace. To put what I endure into a simile, it is not the tempest that troubles me, but sea-sickness."[77] Epictetus quotes lines which he attributes to Pythagoras-- Let sleep not come upon thy languid eyes Ere thou has scanned the actions of the day-- Where have I sinned? What done or left undone? From first to last examine all, and then Blame what is wrong, in what is right, rejoice.[78] These verses, he adds, are for use, not for quotation. Elsewhere he gives us a parody of self-examination--the reflections of one who would prosper in the world--"Where have I failed in flattery? Can I have done anything like a free man, or a noble-minded? Why did I say that? Was it not in my power to lie? Even the philosophers say nothing hinders a man from telling a lie."[79] {56} But self-examination may take us further.[80] We come into the world, he says, with some innate idea (_emphutos ennoia_) of good and evil, as if Nature had taught us; but we find other men with different ideas,--Syrians and Egyptians, for instance. It is by a comparison of our ideas with those of other men that philosophy comes into being for us. "The beginning of philosophy--with those at least who enter upon it aright--by the door--is a consciousness of one's own weakness and insufficiency in necessary things (_astheneias kai adunamias_)." We need rules or canons, and philosophy determines these for us by criticism.[81]