Quote checked against the text
“We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.” — attributed to Epictetus
Not Epictetus. The earliest source we can name is Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, book VII, 23 (life of Zeno of Citium); R. D. Hicks’s translation, Loeb Classical Library, 1925; the wording was searched in the author’s editions and not found there.
Neither “two ears” nor “one tongue” nor “one mouth” nor “twice as much as we speak” returns a hit in Carter’s 1758 Enchiridion or in Long’s 1877 selection of the Discourses. The hits are in the list of circulating quotes, where the sentence is filed under his name in two wordings, the modern one and the older “Nature hath given men one tongue but two ears”.
That older wording is where the name comes from: it is printed among the fragments attributed to Epictetus, a collection assembled by Schweighäuser out of later anthologies. Those fragments come for the most part from Stobaeus, and Stobaeus gives this one to Zeno of Citium. Diogenes Laertius gives it to Zeno too, in his life of Zeno: to a youth who was talking nonsense, Zeno said that we have two ears and only one mouth so that we may listen the more and talk the less.
Our editions cover the whole Enchiridion, only a selection of the Discourses, and no collection of fragments, so an absence there proves little on its own; the older sources settle it. Zeno founded the Stoic school around 300 BC, Epictetus taught four centuries later.
What we searched
Each fragment is searched, normalized, in every file of the editions below. The block is the search and its result, replayed at each build.
The wording was searched in Carter 1758 (Enchiridion, 52 chapters) and Long 1877 (a selection of the Discourses, without book or chapter numbers, plus the Enchiridion).
$ node tools/seo/grep-quote.mjs --lang en --author epictete "two ears" "one tongue" "one mouth" "twice as much as we speak" Elizabeth Carter, 1758 — Enchiridion · 52 chapters (Carter’s numbering) (1 file) "two ears" 0 hits "one tongue" 0 hits "one mouth" 0 hits "twice as much as we speak" 0 hits George Long, 1877 — Discourses (selection) and Enchiridion · a selection of the Discourses, without book or chapter numbers, plus the Enchiridion (1 file) "two ears" 0 hits "one tongue" 0 hits "one mouth" 0 hits "twice as much as we speak" 0 hits $ node tools/seo/grep-quote.mjs --lang fr --author epictete "deux oreilles" "une bouche" "deux fois plus" Jean-Marie Guyau, 1875 — Manuel · 53 chapters (modern numbering) (1 file) "deux oreilles" 0 hits "une bouche" 0 hits "deux fois plus" 0 hits Victor Courdaveaux, 1862 — Entretiens · 9 chapters of the Discourses (I, 1 · I, 15 · I, 18 · I, 24 · I, 25 · II, 13 · II, 18 · III, 16 · III, 24) (9 files) "deux oreilles" 0 hits "une bouche" 0 hits "deux fois plus" 0 hits
This sentence appears once in the list of circulating quotes we collected on 2026-08-09.
What the text says
The earliest source we can name: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, book VII, 23 (life of Zeno of Citium); R. D. Hicks’s translation, Loeb Classical Library, 1925
How to cite
This sentence has no reference in the author’s works. If quoted, it should be credited to its documented source above.
Other sentences checked
All sentences attributed to EpictetusAll quote checks
Every passage in Stoïque carries its reference. The 39 passages of Epictetus are in Stoic+, each with its locator.