It is not things that disturb people, but their opinions about things. Death, for example, is nothing terrible — or it would have seemed so to Socrates too — but the opinion about death, that it is terrible, that is the terrible thing. So whenever we are hindered or disturbed or grieved, let us never blame anyone else, but ourselves — that is, our own opinions. To accuse others for what one does badly oneself is the mark of a person with no education; to accuse oneself, of one who has begun to learn; to blame neither anyone else nor oneself, of one whose education is complete.

This is the hinge the whole Stoic therapy turns on. Between an event and your distress sits a judgment (δόγμα), and Epictetus's claim is that the distress lives in the judgment, not the event. Death is his deliberately extreme case: if death itself were terrible, it would terrify everyone equally, Socrates included — but it did not terrify Socrates, so the terror must come from what people decide about death, not from death. Change the verdict and the feeling changes with it. Two thousand years later this is the premise of cognitive behavioral therapy, which quotes this very line. The second half turns the knife on the reader. Epictetus grades you by whom you blame: point at others and you have not begun; point at yourself and you have started; blame no one at all — because you have stopped issuing the verdicts that produce blame — and the work is done. It is not a counsel of self-reproach but of ownership: the only judgments you can revise are your own, so they are the only place the cure can be applied.