The Meditations of Lucius Annaeus Seneca

I can convey the wisdom of the ancients to you . . . —Virgil, Georgics, 1.176-177 (in 124.1)

But even if the ancients did discover everything, here’s something that will always be new: taking those discoveries made by others and applying them, understanding them, and organising them. (64.8)

So I will send you the books themselves; and I will annotate them too, so that you need not expend much effort hunting through them for the profitable bits, but can get right away to the things that I endorse and am impressed with. (6.5)

I am in the habit of marking passages in the books I read and then typing them all up. However, this habit of mine was not in place when I read Seneca’s Letters the first time. So during my second reading I rectified this, and noted down any passages I thought were good. I thought I would share the resulting list of quotations here for others to make use of if they wish.

Since Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is composed of short passages, given this is what I have distilled Seneca to here, I thought I would give this list of quotes the same title.

So, as with this and any other quotes or ideas you come across from other people, remind yourself that they belong to no one in particular

Whatever is true is my own. (12.11)

Whatever is said well by anyone belongs to me. (16.7)

However, both Seneca and myself urge you to remember that

You must give up hope that you will ever be able to take just a quick sampling from the works of the greatest men. You must read them as wholes, come to grips with them as wholes . . . Still, I have no objection to your studying the individual limbs, provided you retain the actual person. (33.5)

Enjoy.

N.B. I apologise for any spelling errors, lack of italicisation, and other formatting issues.

I may also organise these quotes by theme at some point in the future . . .

My Goodreads “Review” of Seneca’s Letters can be found here

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The Meditations

Can you show me even one person who sets a price on his time, who knows the worth of a day, who realised that every day is a day when he is dying? (1.2)

I am a big spender, I freely admit, but a careful one. (1.4)

The first sign of a settled mind is that it can stay in one place and spend time with itself. (2.1)

One who is everywhere is nowhere. (2.2)

Read always from authors of proven worth; and if ever you are inclined to turn aside to others, return afterward to the previous ones. (2.4)

Obtain each day some aid against poverty, something against death, and likewise against other calamities. And when you have moved rapidly through many topics, select one to ponder that day and digest. (2.4)

If you think that a person is a friend when you do not trust him as much as you trust yourself, you are seriously mistaken; you do not know the meaning of real friendship. (3.2)

Similarly, there is reason to criticise both those who are always on the move and those who are always at rest. Liking to be in the fray does not mean that one is hardworking; it is only the hustle and bustle of an agitated mind. Finding every movement a bother does not mean that one is tranquil; it is just laxity and idleness. So let’s keep in mind this saying I have read in Pomponius:

Some flee so far into their dens that they think everything outside is turmoil.

There should be a mix: the lazy one should do something, the bust one should rest. Consult with nature: it will tell you that it made both day and night. (3.5-3.6)

We have the authority of grown men but the faults of children, of infants even. (4.2)

One cannot attain a life free of anxiety if one is too concerned about prolonging it. (4.4)

Cast off your solicitude for life, then, and in doing so make life enjoyable for yourself. (4.6)

No good thing mentally benefits us while we have it unless we are mentally prepared for the loss of it. (4.6)

Do you realize now for the first time what has in fact been happening to you all along? So it is: since the moment of your birth, you have been moving toward your execution. These thoughts, and others like them, are what we must ponder if we want to be at peace as we await the final hour. For fear of that one makes all our other hours uneasy. (4.9)

What nature requires is close by and easy to obtain. All that sweat is for superfluities. We wear out our fine clothes, grow old in army tents, hurl ourselves against foreign shores, and for what? Everything we need is already at hand. Anyone who is on good terms with poverty is rich. (4.10-4.11)

You are hard at work, forgetting everything else and sticking to the single task of making yourself a better person every day. This I approve, and rejoice in it too. I urge you, indeed plead with you, to persevere. All the same, I have a warning for you. There are those whose wish is to be noticed rather than to make moral progress. Don’t be like them . . . (5.1)

The word “philosophy” makes people uncomfortable enough all by itself, even when used modestly. (5.2)

Within, let us be completely different, but let the face we show to the world be like other people’s. (5.2)

Our aim is to live in accordance with nature, is it not? This is contrary to nature: tormenting one’s body, swearing off simple matters of grooming, affecting a squalid appearance, partaking of foods that are not merely inexpensive but rancid and coarse. A hankering after delicacies is a sign of self-indulgence; by the same token, avoidance of those comforts that are quite ordinary and easy to obtain is an indication of insanity. Philosophy demands self-restraint, not self-abnegation—and even self-restraint can comb its hair. (5.4-5.5)

Not being able to cope with wealth is a sign of weakness. (5.6)

This is itself an indication that the mind has reached a better place, when it perceives faults in itself that previously went unrecognised. (6.1)

For it would be true friendship, such as no hope, no fear, no self-interest can sever. That is a friendship that stays with people until they die—and that people die for. I can name you many people who have friends and yet are without friendship. (6.2)

You cannot imagine how much progress I see myself making every day. (6.3)

So I will send you the books themselves; and I will annotate them too, so that you need not expend much effort hunting through them for the profitable bits, but can get right away to the things that I endorse and am impressed with. (6.5)

Do you ask what you should avoid more than anything else? A crowd. (7.1)

Every single person urges some fault upon us, or imparts one to us, or contaminates us without our even realising it. (7.2)

I become more cruel and inhumane, just because I have been among humans. (7.3)

The mind that is young and not yet able to hold on to what is right must be kept apart from the people. It is all to easy to follow the many. Even Socrates, Cato, or Laelius could have had the character shaken out of them by the multitude that was so different. All the more, then, we who are just now beginning to establish inner harmony cannot possibly withstand the attack of faults that bring so much company along. A single example of self-indulgence or greed does a great deal of harm. A dissipated housemate makes one become less strong and manly over time; a wealthy neighbour inflames one’s desires; a spiteful companion infects the most open and candid nature with his own canker. What do you suppose happens to the character that is under attack bu the public at large? You must either imitate them or detest them. (7.6-7.7)

Retreat into yourself, then, as much as you can. (7.8)

Also well spoken is the remark of whoever it was (for there is some dispute as to the author) who said, when asked why he expended such efforts over a work of art that very few would ever see, 

A few are enough; one is enough; not even one is also enough. (7.11)

Epicurus, writing to one of his companions in philosophy, said,

I write this not for the many but for you: you and I are audience enough for one another. (7.11)

Here is the reason I have hidden myself away and closed the doors: to benefit the greater number. Not one of my days is spent in leisure, and I claim a part of the nights for study. I have no time for sleep, until it overcomes me; my eyes are exhausted and drooping with late hours, but I keep them to the task. (8.1)

The work that I am doing is for posterity. (8.2)

The right path, which I myself discovered late in life when weary from wandering, I now point out to others. (8.3)

Hold therefore to this sound and saving rule of life: indulge the body only to the extent that suffices for health. Deal sternly with it, lest it fail to obey the mind. Let food me for appeasing hunger, drink for satisfying thirst, clothing a protection against cold, a house a shelter against inclement weather. Whether that house is built of sod of variegated marble from foreign lands is of no significance: believe me, a person can be sheltered just as well with thatch as with gold. Scorn all those things that superfluous labour sets up for decoration and for show: keep in mind that nothing but the mind is marvellous, that to the great mind, nothing else is great. (8.5)

You should be a slave to philosophy, that you may attain true liberty. (8.7)

The good that can be given can be taken. —Lucilius (8.10)

“All my goods are with me.” Here is a brave man, and a tough one: he conquered even his enemy’s conquest. “I have lost nothing,” he said, and made Poliorcetes doubt whether he had really conquered at all. “All my goods are with me”: justice, courage, prudence, and this in itself, the ability to think that nothing is good which can be taken away. (9.18-9.19)

Anyone who does not think that what he has is plenty, is miserable, even if he is ruler of the entire world. —Epicurus (9.20)

No one is happy who does not believe himself to be. —Unknown (9.21)

If you think your circumstances are bad, then does it matter what they are really like? (9.21)

Only the wise man is satisfied with what he has: all the foolish are disgusted with themselves, and suffer accordingly. (9.22)

It is said that Crates, a pupil of Stilpo whom I mentioned in my last letter once saw a young man walking by himself and asked him what he was doing all alone.

“I am talking to myself,” he replied.

“Be careful,” said Crates, “Watch carefully, I beg you, for you are talking to a bad person.” (10.1)

That did not come off the top of his head; these remarks have some foundation. (10.3)

This man is not of the common sort; no, he looks toward his true healing. (10.4)

This is how you should speak; this is how you should live. (10.4)

We should develop a fondness for some good man and keep him always before our eyes, to live as though he were watching and act in all things as though he could see. (11.8; Epicurus.)

How sweet it is to have worn out one’s desires and left them behind! (12.4)

One’s entire life consists of parts, large circles enclosing smaller ones. One circle embraces all the rest; this corresponds from birth to one’s last day. A second encloses the years of young adulthood; another binds one’s entire childhood in its circuit. Further, a year contains within itself all the time periods which, multiplied, make up one’s life. A month is bounded by a tighter circle, a day by the smallest; yet even a day moves from a beginning to an end, from sunrise to sunset. That was why Heraclitus, who got his nickname from the obscurity of his sayings, said,

One day is equal to every day. (12.6-7)

Every day, then, should be treated as though it were bringing up the rear, as though it were the consummation and fulfilment of one’s life. (12.8)

Pacuvius, who made Syria his own by possession, used to hold funeral ceremonies for himself, with wine and the ritual meal. After dinner he would have himself carried to bed as his catamites clapped their hands and chanted in Greek, to the accompaniment of instruments, “Life is done! Life is done!” Each and every day he performed his own burial. Let us do the same, not for bad reasons as he did, but for good. Glad and cheerful, let us say, as we go to our rest, 

I have done living; I have run the race

That fortune set for me. (Aeneid, 4.653)

If God gives us a tomorrow, let us be glad to receive it. The happiest person, the most untroubled possessor of himself, is the one who awaits the morrow without anxiety. Anyone who has said, “I have done living” rises profitably each morning, having gained one day. (12.7-9)

Whatever is true is my own. (12.11)

The mind that yields to no judgement but its own. (13.1)

More things frighten us than really affect us, and we are more often afflicted in thought than in fact. (13.4)

All those things that wring sighs and groans from people are minor matters and not worth thinking about. (13.4)

My advice to you is this, rather: don’t be miserable before its time. Those things you fear as if they were impending may never happen; certainly they have not yet happened yet. Some things, then, torment us more than they should, some sooner than they should; and some torment us that should not do so at all: either we add to our pain, or we make it up, or we get ahead of it. (13.4-5)

What do you gain by that? Time. (13.10)

But if fear goes to its fullest extent, then life is not worth living. (13.12)

Stop troubling yourself, and reflect often that the majority of human beings become upset and bothered even when nothing bad is either present or definite for the future. (13.13)

I admit that a fondness for our body is innate in us; I admit that we are charged with the care of it. Nor do I hold that one ought not to make any allowances for the body. What I do hold is that one ought not to be its slave . . . Take scrupulous care of it, but on condition that when required by reason, or self-respect, Orr loyalty, it is to be thrown into the fire. (14.1-2)

Being considered superior is just as harmful as being despised. (14.10)

Therefore let us take refuge in philosophy. These studies, like the stoles of priests, mark one as sacrosanct not only among the good but even among those who are bad in an ordinary way. For eloquence in the courts, or any other kind that stirs the multitude, produces rivals; but this quiet sort that is concerned only with its own business cannot be despised; in fact, it is honoured above all arts, even among the worst people. Wickedness will never gain so much strength, nor conspire so much against the virtues, that the name of philosophy will cease two be revered and sacred. (14.11)

It is foolish, dear Lucilius, and unbefitting an educated man, to busy oneself with exercising the muscles, broadening the shoulders, and strengthening the torso. You may have great success with your training diet and your bodybuilding, but never will you match the strength and weigh of a prime ox. Besides, your mind is weighed down by a more burdensome body. (15.2)

Restrict your body, then, as much as you can, and give more latitude to the mind. (15.2)

There are ways of exercising that are easy and quick, that give the body a workout without taking up too much time—for time is what we have to keep track of more than anything: running, and arm movements with various weights, and jumping, or the fuller’s stomp. Choose whichever you like and make it easy by practice. But whatever you do, return quickly form the body to the mind and exercise that, night and day. A moderate effort is enough to nourish it, and its exercise is such as neither cold nor heat will hamper, nor even old age. Tend to the good that gets better with time. (15.4-5)

I am not telling you to be always poring over a book or tablet: the mind should have some respite, but to relax, not to become lax. (15.6)

So remind yourself often, how much you have achieved. When you see how many people are out ahead of you, think how many are behind. If you want to be thankful to the gods and to your own life, think how many people you have surpassed. But what does it matter about anyone else? You have surpassed yourself. (15.10)

See, this day is my last—or if not the very last, still almost the last. (15.11)

Philosophy is not tricks before an audience, nor is it a thing set up for display. It consists not in words but in actions. One does not take it up just to have an amusing pastime, a remedy for boredom. It moulds and shapes the mind, gives order to life and discipline to action, shows what to do and what not to do. It sits at the helm and steers a course for us who are tossed I waves of uncertainty. Without it, there is no life that is not full of care and anxiety. For countless things happen every hour that need the advice philosophy alone can give. (16.3)

Whatever is said well by anyone belongs to me. (16.7)

. . . covering you with gold, clothing you with purple, endowing you with luxury and riches, so much that you could cover the very ground with marble—wealth not only in your possession but even under your feet! Let there be statues too, and paintings, and everything any art has devised to indulge your expensive taste. What will you learn from these things? Only how to desire more. (16.8)

If anything holds you back, untie the knot, or cut it. (17.1)

Hunger is cheap; it is the palate that is expensive. (17.4)

If you want to have time for your mind, you must either be poor or resemble the poor. Study cannot be beneficial without some concern for frugality, and frugality is just voluntary poverty. (17.5)

Is that how it is? Will you wish to have wisdom only after you have everything else as well? Is this to be your last piece of gear for living, your afterthought, as it were? (17.8)

Happy and carefree, he will laugh at the busy lives of the wealthy and at the hustle and bustle of those who compete for wealth, saying, “Why do you postpone your own self? Will you wait for interest to accrue, for ventures to pay off, for some fat inheritance, when you could become rich right away? Wisdom pays off immediately: its wealth is bestowed on all to whom wealth has come to seem irrelevant. (17.9-10)

These days, one ought more than ever to take charge of one’s mind, ordering it to abstain from pleasures just when everyone else is indulging in them. (18.3)

To do as others do, but not in the same manner. (18.4)

No one is worthy of God unless he has risen above wealth. I do not forbid you to possess wealth; I only seek to make you fearless in possessing it. And the only way to achieve that is if hyoid convince yourself that you will be happy even without it—if you look at it as something that might disappear at any moment. (18.13)

Where will it all end? Why are you waiting until there is nothing more for you to want? That will never happen. (19.6)

We say there is a sequence of causes that constitutes the web of fate. You may be sure that there is a sequence of desires too: the end of one is the beginning of another. (19.6)

As long as nothing is enough for you, you will not be enough for anyone else. (19.7)

Let philosophy sink deep into your heart, and test your progress not by speech or writing but by strength of mind and by the lessening of your desires. Prove your words through your actions. (20.1)

Philosophy teaches us to act, not to speak. Its demands are these: each person should love to the standard he himself has set; his manner of living should not be at woods with itself for with his way of speaking; and all his actions should have a single tenor. This is the chief task of wisdom, and the best evidence of it too: that actions should be in accordance with words, that the person should be the same in all places, a match for himself. “Is there any such person?” Not many, but there are some. It is indeed difficult. And I don’t mean, even, that the wise person always walks the same steps, but only that we walks a single road. (20.2)

Adopt once and for all some single rule to live by, and make your whole life conform to it. (20.3)

Let me then set aside the old definitions of wisdom and give you one that takes in a whole method of human existence. Here’s one I can be content with. What is wisdom? Always wanting the same thing, always rejecting the same thing. (20.5)

People don’t know what it is they want except in the very moment when they want it. (20.6)

It is a great thing not to be corrupted by living amid riches; great is the man who is a pauper in his wealth. (20.10)

Your business is most of all with yourself: it is you that are the problem. You don’t know what you want. You admire honourable conduct more than you imitate it; you see where happiness lies, but you date not go after it. So, since you have little insight into what it is that holds you back, I will tell you. (21.1)

Deep is the abyss of time that will close over us. (21.4)

These splendid sayings of Epicurus also serve another purpose which makes me even more willing to mention them. They prove to those people who take refuge in him for base motives, thinking to find cover for their faults, that they need to live honourable no matter where they go. When you arrive at Epicurus’ Gardens, and see what is written there:

“Here, Guest, will you be well entertained: here pleasure is the highest good—“

Then the keeper of that house will be ready to receive you and, being hospitable and kind, will serve you a plate of porridge and a generous goblet of water and say to you, “Is this not a fine welcome?” “These Gardens,” he will say, “do not stimulate appetite; they appease it. They do not give drinks that make one thirstier, but quench thirst with its natural remedy, which comes free of charge. This is the pleasure in which I have lived to old age.” (21.9-10)

I am speaking to you now of those desires that are not alleviated by soothing speech, desires that must be given something to put an end to them. For about those superfluous desires that can be put off, rebuked, or suppressed, I remind you only of this: such pleasure is natural, but not necessary. You do not owe it anything: anything you do devote to it is voluntary. The belly does not listen to instructions: it merely demands and solicits. Still, it is not a troublesome creditor. You can put it off with very little, if you just give it what you owe rather than what you can. (21.11)

They love the profits of misery even as they curse the miseries themselves. (22.9)

Slavery holds on to a few; many hold on to slavery. (22.11)

Get your head above the water, and live a better life. (22.12)

We spend it all; it slips through our fingers. No one cares how well he lives but only how long—despite the fact that every one of us has the chance to live well, and no one can live long. (22.17)

Do you think I am going to write to you about how leniently the winter has dealt with us (and it was a mild winter), how harsh and unseasonably cold is the spring, and all the other nonsense people write when they are short of things to say? No, I’ll write something that will benefit both you and me. What will that be? What else, but to exhort you toward excellence of mind? Would you like to know what it is that such excellence is founded upon? It is this: don’t rejoice in empty things. (23.1)

This is the joy I want you to possess: you will never run out of it, once you learn where it is to be found. (23.4)

But it is difficult to keep within bounds when you believe something to be good. (23.6)

Surely it is foolish to be miserable now just because you are going to be miserable later on! (24.1)

But what I will do is lead you down a different road to tranquility. If you want to be rid of worry, then fix your mind on whatever it is that you are afraid might happen as a thing that definitely will happen. Whatever bad event that might be, take the measure of it mentally and so assess your fear. You will soon realize that what you fear is either no great matter or not long lasting. (24.2)

Hope for the best, but prepare yourself for the worst. (24.11)

The most shameful of the accusations against us is that we fear in the words of philosophy but not the actions. (24.15)

Death either consumes us or sets us free. (24.18)

“We do not meet death all at once; we move towards it bit by bit.” We die every day, for every day some part of life is taken from us. Even when we are still growing, our life is shrinking. We lost our infancy, then childhood, then youth. All our time was lost in the moment of passage, right up to yesterday, and even today is divided with death as it goes by. As the water clock does not empty out its last drop only but also whatever dripped through before, so our last hour of existence is not the only time we die but just the only time we finish dying. That is when we arrive at death, but we have been. Long time coming there. (24.19-20)

There are many who feel not that life is hard, but that it is pointless. (24.26)

Solitude encourages every fault in us. Once you have progressed far enough to have somer reverence even for yourself, then you may dismiss your tutor; meanwhile, putt yourself under the guardianship of men of authority. Let it be Cato, or Scipio, or Laelius, or someone else at whose coming even desperate characters would suppress their faults, while you go about making yourself the person in whose company you would not dare to do wrong. (25.6)

The time to go off by yourself is especially when you are compelled to be in a crowd—if you are a good man, a quiet man, a temperate man. Otherwise you had better retreat from yourself and into the crowd. Where you are, you are too close to a bad man. (25.7)

What is there to complain about? (26.3)

Away with the assessments of other people: they are always unreliable and contradictory. (26.6)

Excellence of mind cannot be borrowed or bought. I think too that if it were for sale, it would not find a buyer. Yet wickedness is purchased every day. (27.8)

But a thing is never said too much when it has not been well enough learned. Some people need to have remedies shown to them; others need them trodden in. (27.9)

You must change the mind not the venue. Though you cross the sea, though “lands and cities drop away”, as our poet Virgil says, still your faults will follow you wherever you go. (28.1)

Here is what Socrates said to a person who had the same  complaint as you: “Why are you surprised that traveling does you no good, when you travel in your own company? The thing that weighs on your mind is the same s drove you from home.” What good will new coin tries do you? What use is touring cities and sites? All your dashing about is useless in the end. Do you ask why flight is of no avail? You take yourself along. (282.2)

Where you go matters less than who you are when you go. (28.4)

It is not of much use to have jettisoned you own faults if you have now to combat those of others. (28.7)

Truth should only be told to those who will listen. (29.1)

If one makes many attempts, some of them are bound to succeed. (29.2)

Anything that gets its results by chance is not a skill. (29.3)

Never have I wished to please the populace —Epicurus (29.10)

It is by skill in wrongdoing that one cultivates popular acclaim. You must make yourself like them: they will not approve of you unless they recognise you. (29.11)

What matters is not how you seem to others, but how you seem to yourself. (29.11)

What, then, will you gain from philosophy, which is so much admired and so far preferable to all other skills and all other possessions? Just this: that you would rather please yourself than please the people; that you take thought for the quality, not the number of judgements made about you; that you live without fear of gods or humans; that you either defeat your troubles or out an end to them. Otherwise, if I see you much acclaimed by the common crowd—if there is shouting and applause to greet your entrances , as at the pantomime shows—if women and boys sing your praises all over town—I will pity you. Why, shouldn’t I, when I know what road you took to reach such popularity? (29.12)

He who is unwilling to die never wanted to live, for life if given to us with death as a precondition. Death is where we are headed, and for that reason one would be mad to fear it. It is uncertainty that frightens us; when things are certain, we simply await them. (30.10)

But I will be afraid that you will hate such long letters even worse than death! So I’ll stop. (30.18)

As for you, if you want never to be afraid fo death, think about it always. (30.18)

For you had the force of character to pursue every excellence, trampling underfoot the goods that are popularly esteemed. (31.1)

Turn a deaf ear to those who love you most: their intentions are good, but the things they are wishing for you are bad. (31.2)

This is beneficial, to have nothing to do with those who are unlike you, whose desires are different from yours. Indeed, I am confident that you cannot be turned aside and will persist in your intention, even if crowds of bothersome people surround you. (32.1-2)

Remind yourself often how fine a thing it is to reach the summit of life before you die, and then to be in peace as you wait out the remainder of your time, relying only on yourself. For once one possesses happiness, duration does not make it any happier. (32.3)

Would you like to know what it is that makes people greedy for the future? Not one of them yet belongs to himself. (32.4)

In order to rise above necessities, to gain one’s discharge, to be free, one must live a life that is already complete. (32.5)

Where what is noteworthy stands out from the rest, you can be sure the quality is uneven. (33.1)

You must give up hope that you will ever be able to take just a quick sampling from the works of the greatest men. You must read them as wholes, come to grips with them as wholes. (33.5)

Still, I have no objection to your studying the individual limbs, provided you retain the actual person. (33.5)

A beautiful woman is not the one whose ankle or shoulder is praised but the one whose overall appearance steals our admiration away from the individual parts. (33.5)

It s shameful, though, when a man who is making definite progress seizes on flowery bits or props himself up with a handful of commonplaces he has memorised . . . take charge: say something memorable on your own account; bring forth something from your own store. (33.7)

How about it then? Will I not walk in the footsteps of my predecessors? I will indeed use the ancient road—but if I find a route that is more direct and has fewer ups and downs, I will stake out that one. Those who advanced these doctrines before us are not our masters but our guides. The truth lies open to all; it has not yet been taken over. (33.11)

I swell—I exult—I shake off my years and feel again the heat of youth . . . (34.1)

If the actions are inconsistent, the mind has not been set to rights. (34.4)

When I urge you so strongly to study, I am serving my own ends. I want to have a friend, and this cannot happen for my unless you persevere in your own program of self-improvement. (35.1)

One should acquire an education in youth, and then in old age make use of it. (36.4)

. . . so that his mind may achieve its perfection in complete tranquility . . . (36.6)

No one learns just so that he can lie down calmly in a bed of roses if the need should arise . . . (36.9)

And death, which we fear so deeply and refuse to meet, interrupts life, but does not abscond with it: thee day will come again that will return us to the light. It is a day which many would refuse, except that we forget everything before returning. (36.10)

Deliver yourself to philosophy if you wish to be safe, to be tranquil, to be happy, and, what matters most, if you wish to be free. There is no other way you can gain your freedom. (37.3)

People are not lead by their intentions but jerked about by whims. (37.5)

It is shameful to drift rather than to go forward; shameful to find oneself in the midst of a whirlwind of events and ask, astonished, “How did I get here?” (37.5)

For this is the best trait of a noble nature: it is inspired by honourable examples. No man of exalted character takes pleasure in what is base and sordid; it is the sight of greatness that attracts and elevates him. (39.2)

For desires that exceed the bounds of nature cannot but go on to infinity. Our nature has its limit, but empty and perverse desires are inherently unbounded. (39.5)

Speech that aims at the truth should be unaffected and plain. (40.4)

A power divine has descended on him. (41.4)

No one should glory except in what is his own . . . so what if he has attractive slaves, a lovely home, vast plan rations, substantial investment? All these things surround him; they are not in him. Praise in him that which nothing can take away and nothing can confer—that which is distinctive about the human being. (41.7-8)

To live in accordance with his own nature. It is our shred insanity that makes this difficult: we push one another into faults. And how can we be recalled to health, when all people drive us forward and no one holds us back? (41.8)

What is exceptional is rare . . . (42.1)

Just give them the power to do what they want, and you will see: they want the same things as others do. (42.4)

Here is what makes our idiocy quite plain: we think the only things we pay for are those we spend our money on. The things we call free are those on which we spend our very selves. Things wouldn’t be willing to pay for if it meant giving up our house for them, or some pleasant and productive estate, we are quite ready ready to obtain at the cost of anxiety, of danger, of losing our freedom, our decency, our time. You see, we treat ourselves as if we were more worthless than anything else. (42.7)

Once a person possesses himself, then nothing is ever lost to him. (42.10)

I will tell you the measure of our degeneracy: you’ll find hardly anyone who can live with his door open . . . The way we live, an unannounced visit means getting caught. (43.3-4)

Excellence of mind is available to all. (44.2)

Make your own distinctions of what is good and bad, without reference to popular notions. (44.6)

You complain that there is an undersupply of books where you are. What matters is not how many you have, but how good they are. Varied reading gives pleasure; selective reading does real good. If a person wants to reach his destination, he should follow just one road, not wander around over many. What you are doing is traipsing around, not journeying. (45.1)

We embrace bad things rather than good; we choose one thing and then the opposite; our aims and intentions are all in conflict with one another.

The happy person is not the one ordinary people call happy, no the one who has been showered with money, but rather the one whose every good resides in the mind. That one is upright and exalted; he spurns underfoot the objects of wonder; he would not trade his life for any other that he sees. He assesses a person only by that part which makes him a human being. He takes nature for his teacher, regulates his life by nature’s laws, lives as nature has directed. His goods are those no power can strip away; whatever is bad, he turns to good. He is sure in judgement, unshaken, undismayed. There are forces that move him, but none that alarm him. The sharpest, deadliest blows that fortune can inflict do not wound him; he feels but a sting, and that rarely. As for those other darts that assail the human race, those bounce off him like hail hitting a rood, that rattles and then melts without hurting the one inside. (45.9)

Much time is wasted pursuing what is superfluous, that many people miss out on life by going after life’s equipment. Observe individuals, and study people in general, and you will find every one of us living for tomorrow.

“Is there any harm in that?” you say. Yes, endless harm. For they are not living; they are only about to live. Everything is deferred. Even if we are paying attention, life would slip by us; as it is, we put off living, and our lives race past us as if they belonged to someone else—ending on the last day, yet lost to us every day. (45.12)

It’s one thing to have an interest in logic, quite another when they make logic their sole concern. (45.13)

I will write more about the book when I have been over it a second time. (46.3)

Unhappy he, who lives for this alone. (47.6)

Live with an inferior the same way you would want a superior to live with you. (47.11)

Jobs are assigned by chance; character is something each person gives himself. (47.15)

Just as one would be foolish to consider buying a horse when one hasn’t inspected the animal itself but only its saddle and bridle, so it is extremely foolish to judge a human being by his clothing and his position in life. For position is only one more garment that surrounds us. (47.16)

“He is a slave.” But perhaps his mind is free. (47.16)

No servitude is more shameful than the kind we take on willingly. (47.17)

One thing about good character is that it is content with itself and so persists over time. (47.21)

Where are you wondering off to? What are you doing? (48.8)

All those around you are reaching their hands in your direction, imploring you for aid in lives that are ruined or are going to ruin. You are their hope, their succour. They are asking you to rescue them from turmoil; scattered and wandering, they need you to show them the bright light of truth. (48.8)

But sometimes familiar spots do awaken a yearning that has been hidden in our mind, not rekindling a memory that had gone out but stirring up one that was at rest. (49.1)

The rapidity of time is boundless—and is more evident when one looks back. For though it goes at breakneck speed, it glides by so smoothly that those who are intent on the present moment fail to notice it passing. (49.2)

Time never used to seem so swift; now its speed amazes me, whether because I perceive the finish line approaching, or because I have begun to pay attention and compute what I have lost. (49.4)

Cicero says that twice his lifetime would not be time enough for him to read the lyric poets. (49.5)

These logicians think they re accomplishing something. I am not saying one should not give such things a look—but it should be only a lot, a greeting from the doorway, just enough to make sure we are not taken in by them, thinking there is some deep and arcane value in that they do. (49.6)

Encourage me to face what is difficult, give me the serenity to accept what I cannot avoid. (49.10)

The goodness of a life depends not on how long it is but on how it is used; and that it is possible—in fact quite common—for a person to have a long life that is scarcely a life at all. (49.10)

Say to me before I sleep, “It’s possible you will not wake up,” and when I rise, “It's possible you will never sleep again.” Say to me when I go out, “It’s possible you will not return,” and when I return, “It’s possible you will never leave.” (49.10)

But I hope that you are now living in such a way that I know how you are doing no matter where you are. (50.1)

What other endeavour do you have than to make yourself a better person each day—to lay aside some error, to come to understand that what you think are flaws in your situation are in fact flaws in yourself? (50.1)

No on realised he is grasping or avaricious. The blind at lest request a guide; we wander about without one and say, “It’s not that I am ambitious; this is just how one has to live at Rome. It’s not that I overspend; it’s just that city living demands certain expenditures. It’s not my fault that I am prone to anger, that I do not yet have any settled plan of life—this is just what a young person does.” Why do we deceive ourselves? Out trouble is not external to us; it is within, right does to the vital organs. The reason it is so difficult for us to be restored to health is that we do not realize we are sick. (50.3-4)

No one acquires as excellent mind without first having a bad one. (50.7)

There are some who have escaped toward truth without assistance from anyone, forging their own path. (52.3)

Instead, let’s call in those who teach by their manner of living. After saying what one ought to do, they prove it by doing so themselves; when they say one. Ought to avoid something, you don’t catch them doing the same thing later on. (52.8)

Choose as your helper someone you admire more when you see him than when you listen to him. (52.8)

For nothing could be more shameful than philosophy that hungers for applause. (52.9)

Why do people not admit their faults? Because they are still in the midst of them. Dreams are told by those who are awake. (53.8)

Devote yourself entirely to philosophy. (53.8)

Refuse every other claim on you, boldly and openly; there is no reason you need to do philosophy only in your spare time. (53.8)

Make time for excellence of mind. No one gets there while occupied with business. (53.9)

Philosophy is a full-time job, not a hobby. (53.9)

Turn your entire mind to philosophy. Sit by philosophy and serve it, and you will be much above other people. Mortals will be all far behind you, and the gods not far ahead. (53.11)

Here indeed is a great achievement: to retain our human weakness and yet have the tranquility of God. (53.12)

Death is just nonexistence. I know already what that is like: what will exist after me is the same as existed before me. If there is any torment in this thing, then there must have been torment also before we saw the light of day. Yet we did not feel any discomfort at the time. (54.4)

The person you should praise—and imitate—is the one who enjoys living and yet is not reluctant to die. (54.7)

Soft living punishes us with weakness: after refusing to do a thing for some time, we cease to be able to do it. (55.1)

But location does not really contribute much to tranquility. What matters is a mind that accommodates all things to itself. (55.8)

I swear it—silence is not as necessary to a scholarly retreat as you might think. (56.1)

I think a voice is more distracting than any din; for the one engages our mental faculties, the other merely fills the ears with its reverberations. (56.4)

Only as the mind develops into excellence do we achieve any real tranquility. (56.6)

Not one of us is the same in old age as he was in youth; not one of us is the same in the morning as he was the day before. Our bodies are carried away like rushing streams. Anything you see is passing as time passes; not one of the things we see stays put. I myself, even as I tell you of these changes, have changed . . . for that reason I am amazed that we are so far out of our minds as to love a thing that is so fleeting—the body—and that we are afraid ever to die, when every moment is the death of our previous condition. Thuy be afraid of something happening once when it is happening every day? (58.22-23)

. . . so we should sometimes relax our minds and refresh them with some amusement. Still, even one’s amusements should become worthwhile endeavours: if you put your mind to them, you will derive something potentially beneficial. (58.25)

I take every thought no matter how far removed from philosophy, and try to extract something from it and turn it to good use. (58.26)

Weak and fluid ourselves, we stand in the midst of illusions. So let us direct our minds toward things that are eternal. (58.27)

The words of his philosophy are Greek, but the values are Roman. (59.7)

How can anyone learn an amount sufficient to combat his vices if he learns only in the spare time left over from cultivating those vices? Not one of us goes into any depth. We only hit the high points and think that a few minutes spent on philosophy is enough and more than enough for busy people. (59.10)

Everyone you see is in pursuit of joy, but they do not know where great and lasting joy is to be had. One tries to get it from dinner parties and self-indulgence; another from elections and crowds of supporters; another from his girlfriend; another from pointless display of education and literary studies that do not heal what is amiss. All of them are deceived by specious and short-lived enticements, like drunkenness, that pays for a singe hour’s cheery insanity with a long-lasting hangover, or like the applause and acclamation of a large following, that costs you great anxiety both to get and to retain. (59.15)

He is alive—vigorous—free—he soars above humankind. (64.3)

I will tell you what is my own state of mind when I read him: I yearn to challenge every stroke of fortune—to shout, “Why let up fortune? do your worst! See, I am ready!” (64.4)

But even if the ancients did discover everything, here’s something that will always be new: taking those discoveries made by others and applying them, understanding them, and organising them. (64.8)

Aristotle’s view is that the word “cause” is used in three ways. “The first cause is the material itself, without which nothing can be creates; the second is the artisan; the third is the form that is imposed on each and every work, just as it is upon the statue.” This is what Aristotle calls the eidos. “There is also a fourth cause in addition to these, namely, the purpose of the work as a whole.” (65.4)

There are, then five causes on Plato’s account: that from which, that by which, that in which, that according to which, and that because of which. Let of all, there is that which comes of these. For instance, in a statue, that from which is the bronze, that by which his the craftsman, that in which is the form that is applied to it, that according to which is the model that the person who makes it is imitating, that because of which is the maker’s purpose, and that which comes of these is the statue itself. (65.8)

. . . those studies by which the mind is calmed. (65.15)

I examine myself first, and then this world of ours. (65.15)

Do you forbid me to gaze upon the universe? Do you pull me back from the whole, and confine me to the part? Am I not to ask what are the beginnings of all things? (65.19)

Do you deny me my share of heaven—which is to say, do you bid me live with eyes cast downward? (65.20)

Too great am I to be slave to my body; too great is that for which I was born. (65.21)

Disregard for one’s body is certain liberation. (65.22)

What is death? Either an end or a crossing over. I am not afraid to come to an end (for that is the same as never having started), and neither am I afraid to cross over. For nowhere will I be as constricted as I am here. (65.24)

On the first day, our topic for discussion was this: how can all goods be equal to one another if they are of threefold status? It is the position of our school that some goods are primary—for instance joy, peace, the safety of one’s homeland—while others are secondary, manifested in unfortunate material, such as endurance under torque or self-control during serious illness. The former goods we choose for ourselves unconditionally, the latter if it becomes necessary. And there are still the tertiary goods, sun as modest walk, a calm and dignified facial expression, and gestures befitting an intelligent person n how can al these be equal to one another when some are choice worthy and others worthy of avoidance? (66.5-6)

The possibility of increase shows that a thing is imperfect. (66.9)

No action is honourable when performed by one who is unwilling or under impulsion. Everything that is honourable is voluntary. Mingle it with any reluctance, any complaint, any second thoughts, any fear, and it loses its best feature: it is no longer self-determined. Timorousness implies slavishness, and that which is unfree cannot be honourable. (66.16)

There is a great difference between joy ad pain. If I am asked to choose, I will pursue one and avoid the other, for the one is in accordance to with nature, the other contrary to it. (66.19)

. . . who possesses nothing but himself, yet in himself possesses everything. (66.22)

Virtue is just as praiseworthy when found in a body that is healthy and free as it is in one that is sick and in chains. So do not esteem your own virtue many more highly if fortune has provided it with a whole and sound body than you would if its body were disfigured in some way. That would be like judging the worth of a master by how his slaves are dressed. (66.23)

No one loves his homeland because it is great, but only because it is his. (66.26)

Anything commended by true reasoning is solid and lasting; it strengthens the mind and lifts it to the skies, to remain there always. (66.31)

Those things that are praised without good reason, that are goods according to the popular account, merely puff us up, causing us to delight in empty things. (66.31)

To put it briefly: the material of the good is sometimes contrary to nature; but the good never is, since there is no good without reason, and reason follows nature. (66.39)

What, then, is reason? The imitation of nature. What is the highest good go the human being? Behaving as nature intended. (66.39)

If there is no turmoil in his mind and no pain in his body, then his wish is fully achieved. If any further delights come his way, they do not augment his highest good but season it, as it were, and enhance it. For that ultimate good of human nature is restricted to peace of body and mind. (66.46)

My most abundant conversation is with books. (67.2)

Clothe yourself in the mind of a great man; stand aside for a while from the opinions of the common crowd. (67.12)

Bank this away in your mind: the sage is never more active than when things divine and human come into his view. (68.2)_

I now return to my earlier exhortation, that you not let anyone know about your leisure. Don’t put up a sign saying “Philosophy and Quiet.” Give your plan some other name: call it ill health or weakness or laziness boasting of one’s leisure is just an idle form of ambition. (68.3)

When you retire, your object should not be for people to talk about you but for you to talk to yourself. (68.6)

I’d rather have your forgiveness for my leisure than your envy. (68.9)

He who comes to wisdom when old comes so many years the wiser. (68.14)

It is like love. When one wants to rid oneself of that passion, one has to avoid all reminders of the body one’s affections have chosen—for there is nothing that regains its raw power so easy—and so it is with every fervent desire: one must turn both eyes and ears away from hat one has left behind. (69.3)

First we lose sight of our childhood, then of our youth, then of the entire interval between youth and age, and then of the best years of old age as well. Finally there comes into view that ending shared by the entire human race. (70.2)

Our good does not consist merely in living but in living well. Hence the wise person lives as long as he ought to, not as long as he can. He considers where he will be living, and how, and with whom, and what he will be doing. He is always thinking about the quality of his life, not the quantity. (70.4)

This is the one reason why we cannot complain about life: life does not hold anyone by force. The human condition is well situated in that no one is miserable by his own fault. If it suits you, live; if not, you are allowed to return to where you came from. (70.15)

It is wrong to steal the means of living, but very fine to steal the means of dying. (70.27)

Each time you want to know what to pursue or what to avoid, look to your highest good, the aim of your life as a whole. Everything we do ought to be in accordance with that aim. Only one ho has the entirety of his life in view is in a position to arrange life’s particulars.(71.2)

But sometimes people know things without knowing they know them. (71.4)

By teaching the minutiae they debase the mind; they fritter it away. (71.6)

Socrates, he who summoned all philosophy back towards ethics . . . (71.7)

If I have any authority with you, then follow those, so that you may be happy; and if someone thinks you are a fool, let him. Whoever wants to may insult you or do you wrong: you will be unaffected, as long as virtue is on your side. If you want to be happy, if you truly want to be a good man, then let yourself be disposed. —Praphrase of Plato, Gorgias, 527c (71.7)

That which is, will not be. (71.13)

The Old Academics admit that Regulus was happy even amid such torments, but not to the full and perfect extent of happiness. This is completely unacceptable. If one is not hoary, one cannot have attained the highest good. The highest good does not admit of any further degree of goodness, as long as there is virtue in it. (71.18)

It is not the material that makes them good or bad but virtue: wherever that appears, everything is of the same measure and the same value. (71.21)

These things are not difficult by nature, but we ourselves are listless and feeble. (71.23)

It’s not only what you see that matters, it’s how you see. (71.24)

None of these can happen to the man of wisdom: he stands upright under any load. Nothing diminishes him; nothing he had to endure displeases him. Among all the things that can happen to a human being, there is not one that he complains of just because it has happened to him. He knows his own strength; he knows that he exists for the bearing of burdens.

I do not put the sage in a separate class from the rest of humankind, and neither do I eliminate pain and grief from him as if he were some sort of rock, not susceptible to any feeling. I keep in mind that he is made up of two parts. One is non rational, and it is this that experiences the biting, the burning, the pain. The other part is rational; it is this that holds unshakable opinions and that is fearless and unconquerable. In this latter resides the highest good of humankind. Before that good is filled out, the mind is uncertain and in turmoil; but when it has been perfected, the mind is stable and unmoved. For this reason, the person who has made a start, the one who is committed to virtue but is still ascending the summit, who even if he is drawing near to perfect goodness has yet to apply the finishing touches, while sometimes slack off and allow his concentration to falter. (71.27-28)

To tell it requires but a few quick words: that virtue is the sole good, and certainly that nothing is goof without virtue; moreover, that virtue itself is located in our better part, namely, the rational part. What is this virtue? True and unshakable judgement, for from this comes the impulses of the mind; by this, every impression that stimulates impulse is rendered perfectly clear. (71.32)

The goods of the body are indeed good for bodies, but overall they are not goods. They will indeed have some value, but no true worth and they will differ widely from one another, some being of lesser degree and others greater. (71.33)

Most of progress consists in being willing to make progress. (71.36)

This is recognise in myself: I am willing—with my entire mind, I am willing. And I see that you too are inspired; you are hurrying eagerly toward the most beautiful of ends. Let us both make haste! Only then is life worth living. Otherwise we are just marking time, and shamefully too, surrounded by ugliness. Let us strive to make very moment belong to us—but it never will belong to us until we belong to ourselves. (71.36)

There are some subjects one can write about even in a travelling carriage; others demand a comfortable seat, some leisure time, and freedom from distraction. (72.2)

We ought not to wait for our spare time to practice philosophy; rather, we should neglect other occupations to pursue this one task for which no amount of time would be sufficient, even if our lives were prolonged to the greatest extent of the human lifespan. You might as well not bother with philosophy if you are going to practice it intermittently. For it does not stay in one place during an interruption. No, it is like some object that springs back after being compressed: once you let up, you revert to where you were before. You have to take a stand against occupations. Rather than reducing your encumbrances, you should get rid of them altogether. There is no time that is not well suited to these healing studies, yet there are many who fail to study when caught up in the problems that give one reason to study. (72.3)

For health of body is a temporary condition, and one that no doctor can bestow . . . but when the mind is healed, it is once and for all . . . I will tell you what I mean by a mind that has been healed: one that is content within itself, that has confidence in itself; one that realises that all those things we mortals wish to have, all the favours we give and ask in return, have no bearing whatever on happiness. For that to which any addition can be made is not complete, and that which can suffer diminution is not eternal. If cheerfulness is to endure, one must rejoice in one’s own resources. All ordinary objects of longing are in flux, this way and that. Fortune’s gifts are not ours to keep. (72.6-7)

There is yet a third contingent: those who are on the verge of wisdom. Although they have not yet reached it, they have it in sight—within striking distance, as it were. No longer are they buffeted by the waves; no longer do they even feel an undertow. Though not yet landed, they are already within the harbour. (72.10)

We ought not to succumb to occupations. They must be kept out: once they make it through the door, they will bring in others as well. Let’s resist them from the beginning: the start will not be better the the finish. (72.11)

All forms of ambition have this defect: they never look back. Nor is it only ambition that finds no rest, but every form of desire, for desire is always beginning afresh from its fulfilment. (73.3)

Intelligent management has blessed him with fertile hours of leisure, control of his own time, quietness untroubled by civic responsibilities. (73.10)

What value, then, shall we set on that tie of peace which is spent among the gods—which makes us gods ourselves? (73.11)

Virtue is not greater just because it lasts longer. (73.13)

No one can be happy, then, who entrusts himself to this belief. For there is no happiness without tranquility: a life amid anxieties is a life of misery. Everyone who is much devoted to the advantages of fortune inevitably sets himself up for great emotional turmoil. (74.4)

But besides all that, either those so-called goods really are not good or human beings are more fortunate than God. For God makes no use of those things that are dear to us: lust means nothing to him, nor the delicacies of the table, nor wealth, nor any other of those tawdry pleasures that humans find so enticing. Either we must believe that there are goods that God does not have, or God’s not having them is proof that they are not goods. Moreover, many of these would-be goods belong to animals more abundantly than to human beings. Animals partake of food more eagerly, are less exhausted by sexual intercourse, have greater and more consistent strength. It follows that they are much happier than humans. For they live without wickedness or deceit; they have a greater and easier capacity for pleasure, and they enjoy those pleasures with no fear of shame or regret. (74.14-15)

Let us use them, not glory in them. (74.18)

Whether you draw a large circle or a small one concerns the size, not the shape. (74.27)

Therefore it is equally happy, for true happiness resides in just one place: the mind itself. The stability, the grandeur, the tranquility of real happiness cannot be attained without knowledge of things divine and human. (74.29)

Yet what could be more senseless than suffering over what has not yet happened? Rather than awaiting future trials, you are summoning them to your side! Better you should delay them if you cannot dispel them altogether.

“Why,” you ask, “should a person not be tormented by the future?” Suppose one were to hear that in fifty years’ time he would be put to torture. The only way he would be alarmed would be if he were to bypass the intervening years and insert himself into the anxiety that is to come a lifespan later. The same thing happens with minds that deliberately make themselves ill by sorrowing over events long in the past. They are seeking out reasons for grief. Both the past and the future are absent; we have no sensation of either. And where you have no sensation, there is no source of pain. (74.33-34)

You complain that I am expending less care on the letters I send you. So I am, for who expends care over a conversation? only one who deliberately adopts an affected manner of speaking. I wish my letters to be like what my conversation would be if you and I were sitting or walking together: easy and unstudied. They have in them nothing forced, nothing feigned. (75.1)

The one impression I would want to make upon you is that I feel every one of the things I say; indeed, that I love them as well as feel them. (75.3)

Let this be the whole of our intention: let us say what we feel, and feel what we say; let the conversation be in harmony with how we live. (75.4)

So many things to know: when will you learn them? When will you fix them in your mind so that they cannot be forgotten? When will you try them out? For these are not like other objets of study. With these, memorisation is not enough: you must out them into effect. The happy person is not the one who knows them but the one who performs them. (75.7)

No one has gotten beyond the peril of vice until he has shed it altogether, but no one has shed it altogether unless he has put on wisdom in its place. (75.10)

The infirmities are faults that have become ingrained and hard, like greed and ambition. These are conditions that bind the mind much more tightly and have begun to be permanent afflictions. To give a brief definition, an infirmity is a persistent judgement in a corrupted person that certain things are very much worth pursuing that in fact are only slightly worth pursuing. Or, if you prefer, we can define it this way: it is being overly concerned with things that one ought to pursue either casually or not at all, or considering something to be of great value when in fact it is either of some lesser value or of no value at all. (75.11)

What awaits us, if ever we emerge from this murky depth to the lofty regions above, is tranquility of mind and the freedom and independence that come when all error has been expelled. What is freedom, you ask? To gear no human being and no god, to want neither what is base nor value what is excessive, to have absolute power over oneself. Just being one’s own person is wealth beyond measure. (75.187)

What could be more foolish than failing to learn a thing simply because you haven’t learned it earlier? (76.1)

The criticism of ignorant people is not something to get upset about. (76.4)

No one attains wisdom merely by chance. Money will come of its own accord; public office will be conferred on you; popularity and influence will perhaps be accorded you without any action on your part, virtue, though, will not just happen to you. The work it takes to recognise it is neither easy not short but the effort is worth making, for by it one will take possession of every good at once. For there is but one—the honourable. You will find nothing real, nothing sure, in those things that reputation favours.  (76.6)

What is special about a human being? Reason. When that is set straight and made complete, it achieves the blissful fulfilment of human nature. (76.10)

All the actions of an entire life are governed by consideration for what is honourable and what is base; reasoning about what to do or not do is guided accordingly. Let me explain. A good man will do what he believe is honourable, even if it is arduous, even if it is dangerous. Conversely, he will not do hat he believes is base, even if it brings money, or pleasure, or power. Nothing will frighten him away from hat is honourable; nothing will entice him toward what is base. So it is only if there is no good other than virtue and nothing bad except what is shameful that he will pursue the honourable unconditionally and avoid the base unconditionally, and will look to those two in every action of life. (76.18)

Not one of the whom wealth and public office have taken to the top is truly great. Why does he appear great? You are including the pedestal in his measurement. A dwarf is not tall even if he stands on a mountain; a giant will keep his height even if he stands in a pit. This is our mistake; this is how we are fooled: we do not assess people why what they are but add to them the trappings of their station. Yet when you want to make a true assessment of a person and know what he is like, strip him naked. Let him shed his inheritance, his offices, and all of fortune’s other lives. Let him take off even his body. Contemplate his mind and see what is his quality and what his stature: is he great through his own store or someone else’s? (76.31-32)

The wise man accustoms himself to misfortunes that are yet to come: he takes what others make light through long endurance and makes it light through long reflection. We sometimes hear the voices of the inexpert saying, “I knew this was waiting for me.” The wise man knows that everything is waiting for him. No matter what happens, he says, “I knew it.” (76.34)

A journey is unfinished if you stop in the middle, or anywhere short of your destination; but life is never cut short as long as one lives honourably. it is complete no matter where you end, as long as you end it in a good way. (77.4)

But it often happens that a person has to make a brave end for reasons that are not particularly weighty. For the reasons that keep us here are not weighty either. (77.4)

Why are you crying? What is it you want? You’re wasting your efforts. (77.12)

Stop hoping that your prayers will ever change what gods ordain. (Virgil, Aeneid, 6.376, 77.12)

Do you expect me to tell you exemplary tales about great men? I will tell you some about mere children. There is one about a Spartan who was captured when still very young. He kept shouting in his own Doric tongue, “I will not be a slave!” And he proved it too: the first time he was ordered to do a slave’s insulting task—for they told him to fetch the chamber pot—he dashed his head against a wall and burst his soul.. (77.14)

“I am no slave”? Poor thing, you are a slave: a slave to others, a slave to poverty, a slave to life. For life itself id slavery when one lacks the courage to die. (77.15)

You wish to live; do you know how? You fear to die; what of it? Isn’t the life you are living a kind of death? Once when Gaius Caesar was travelling the Latium road, he was accosted by a prisoner on a chain gang, an aged fellow with a beard down to his chest, who begged for death. “Are you alive now?” He said. That is the answer to give to those people who would be better off dead: “You fear to die; are you alive now?” (77.18)

Life is like a play: what matters is not how long the show goes on but how well it is acted. It makes no difference where you stop. Stop wherever you please; just make the ending a good one. (77.20)

Honourable consolations are curative: what raises up the mind also benefits the body. It was my studies that saved me; it was philosophy that I had to thank when I rose from my bed and when I regained my strength. I owe it my life, and life is the least of what I owe it. (78.3)

The reason you will die is not that you are sick but that you are alive. That fact will remain even after you get well; your recovery is an escape from sickness but not an escape from death. (78.6)

Don’t make your own sufferings harder to bear by burdening yourself with complaints. Pain is a trivial matter when not augmented by belief. In fact, if you begin to encourage yourself, saying, “It’s nothing or at least it isn’t much; let’s put up with it until it is over,” then as long as you think of it as trivial you will make it so. Everything depends on belief. It is not only ambition, self-indulgence, and avarice that look to opinion; we feel pain by it as well. Each person is as wretched as he believes himself to be. (78.12)

Besides, people always embellish their troubles, deceiving even themselves. (78.14)

There are two things, then, that one ought to cut back: fear of future troubles and memory of those that are past. One concerns me no longer, the other not yet. When a person is in the midst of difficulties, let him say,

Perhaps this too will someday bring us pleasure in memory. (Virgil, Aeneid, 1.223)

Let him contend against them with all his might: if he yields, he will be beaten; if he exerts himself against his pain, he will defeat it. As it is, most people might pull the building down on top of themselves when they ought to be holding it up. When something is leaning against you, hanging over you, crushing you with its weight, and you begin to back away from it, it topples towards you and lands all the more heavily upon your head; but if you stand firm, you will be able to push it back. (78.14-15)

Just as enemies wreak more destruction in a rout, so does every stroke if misfortune fall more heavily on those who give up and turn their backs on it. “But it is a heavy load.” What of it? Do we have our strength only for carrying light burdens? (78.17)

It will also be beneficial to depart mentally from the pain and turn your mind towards other thoughts. Think of honourable deeds, brave deeds you have performed; reflect on what is good in your character. Let your memory range over everything you have most admired. Then bring to mind some great example of courage and victory over pain: the man who persevered in reading a book as he underwent surgery for varicose veins; the one who did not stop laughing while the torturers, angered by his defiance, tried out every implement of their cruelty on him. If pain has been defeated by laughter, can it not be defeated by reason? Name anything you like: sinus infections, constant coughing so violent it brings up parts of your insides; fever that scalds your to the core; thirst; limbs twisted the wrong way by deformation of the joints; none of them are as bad as the flame—the rack—the branding iron—the force exerted on already aggravated wounds to make them deeper and more severe. Yet even among those there was one who did not groan. More than that: he did not even ask for mercy. More than that: he laughed, and he meant it! After that, don’t you want to laugh down this pain you feel? (78.18-19)

As for mental pleasures, no doctor orders his patient to abstain from them. And these are greater and more reliable pleasures. One who devotes himself to them with good understanding no longer cares for all those things that tickle the senses. (78.22)

For boredom cannot take over one’s life when one ponders such a variety of exalted and divine themes: it is when one’s leisure is spent in idleness that one is overcome by self-loathing. The mind that traverses all the universe will never weary of truth; only falsehood will be tedious. (78.26)

For as Posidonius says,

A single day gives more time to the educated than the lives of lives for the untutored. (78.28)

Anyway, it is fertile ground for everyone. The earlier writers have not, I think, exhausted the possibilities; rather, they have opened up the way. It makes a big difference whether you take up a spent subject or one that has merely been treated before. A topic grows over time; invention does not preclude inventiveness. (79.5)

One who thinks only of his contemporaries is born for but a few. (79.17)

But I spoke out of turn when I promised myself silence and uninterrupted privacy. Here comes a great road from the stadium; and although it does not shake my resolution, it does distract me into wrestling with this very subject. I think to myself, “How many people exercise their bodies, and how few their minds! What a great confluent of people attend this fickle show merely for entertainment, and what solitude attends the pursuits of culture weak-minded are those whose strong arms and shoulders we admire!” (80.2)

Athletes require a great deal of food and drink, much oil, and lengthy exercises; but virtue will be yours without any supplies or expenses. Anything that can make you a good person is already in your possession. (80.3)

What do you need in order to be good? Willingness. (80.4)

When you are about to buy a hose, you order that the saddle be removed; you pull all the trappings off those that are for sale so that no bodily defects may escape your eye. Will you, then, assess the worth of a human being with clothes wrapped all about him? Slave dealers use the tricks of their trade to conceal anything that might be displeasing, and buyers for that reason are suspicious of every adornment. If you were to see an arm or a leg bound up in some way, you would demand that it be laid bare and the limb itself be shown to you. Do you see that king of Scythia or of Sarmatia, with a splendid crown on his head? If you want to know his true worth, the entirety of his character, then take away his headdress: much that is bad lies hidden underneath. (80.9-10)

But why do I speak of others? If you want to give yourself a thorough evaluation, set aside your money, your house, your rank, and look within yourself. Until you do that, you know what you are like only from what other people tell you. (80.10)

Life will soon grind to a halt if one has to give up every activity that meets with resistance. (81.2)

Only the wise person knows what value ought to be assigned to each thing. (81.8)

The reward for right action is having acted rightly. (8119)

As long as we are seeking a benefit, there is nothing we value more highly; once we have obtained it, there is nothing we value less. (81.28)

We are drawn from what is right by wealth, honour, power, and everything else that is precious in our eyes, though cheap in actual worth. (81.28)

We should not take public opinion as the basis for our deliberations; we should look to the nature of things. There is nothing wonderful in those objects, nothing to entice our minds, except our own habit of admiring them. For that are not held in high regard because they are desirable; rather, they are desired because people hold them in high regard. The errors of individuals cause popular misconception, then the popular misconception causes individuals to err. (81.29)

Keep on the way you have begun, and let your calm manner become a settled disposition—calm, but not soft. (82.1)

Leisure without study is death; it’s like being buried alive. (82.3)

No one praises death; rather, we praise the spirit that death can carry off but cannot vanquish. All such things are not in themselves either honourable or glorious, but any of them that virtue meets and handles is made honourable and glorious by it. In themselves, they are intermediate. What makes the difference is whether vice puts a hand to them or virtue. (82.11)

A serious, well-disciplined man but positively soaked in wine. (83.15)

Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary insanity. (83.18)

Imagine the drunken state continuing for a number of days; would you hesitate to call that madness? So even as it is, it is not a lesser form of insanity but only a shorter one. (83.18)

Continual drunkenness causes the mind to become brutish. For since they are frequently not themselves, the habit of insanity becomes ingrained, and faults acquired under the influence of wine thrives even without it. (83.26)

We ought neither to write exclusively nor read exclusively: the first—writing, that is—will deaden and exhaust our powers; the second will weaken and dilute them. Once must do both by turns, tempering one with the other, so that whatever is collected through reading may be assimilated into the body by writing. (84.2)

Our mind should do the same: they should hide everything that has contributed and show forth only the results. Even if you exhibit a resemblance to some admired author who ha left a deep impression on you, I want you to resemble him s a son does, not as a statue does. A statue is a dead thing. (84.7-8)

I take to be the case with the good man is not that faults are diminished but that they are absent. (85.5)

A crowd of emotions, even moderate ones, is more powerful than any single emotion would be, even at full force. (85.6)

It would be easier to deal with someone who had a single thoroughgoing fault than with one who has every fault, even though he has them in lesser degree. (85.7)

It is easier to forestall their beginnings than to govern the impulse. Hence the notion of “moderation” is false and of no utility.we should treat it just as we would the suggestion that a person ought to go insane in moderation or get sick in moderation. (85.9)

I will tell you that lies behind this error: they do not realize that the happy life is just one life. It is quality, not quantity, that puts it in the position of being best. That’s why its status is equal whether it is long or short, wide-ranging or more restricted, spread out over many places and many situations or collected into one. He who evaluates it by its number, its measure, its situation, deprives it of its chief excellence. What is the chief excellence of the happy life? Its fullness. The aim of eating and drinking is, I think, satiety. One person eats more, another less; what difference does it make? Both are now satisfied. One drinks more, another less; what difference does it make? Neither of them is thirsty any longer. One has lived more years, another fewer, that doesn’t matter if the many years and the few have made them equally happy. He whom you call “less happy” is not happy: that is not a word that can be scaled back. (85.22-23)

The skills serve life; wisdom rules it. (85.32)

We have reached such a pitch of luxury that we don’t even want to walk unless we tread upon precious stones. (86.7)

As a matter of fact, he didn’t even have that sort every day: accounts of life in old Rome indicate that they washed their arms and legs daily—the parts soiled by work, naturally—but their whole bodies only on market day. At that someone will say, “Obviously they must have been very dirty! What do you suppose they smelled like?” Like military service; like work; like men. Now that fancy bathhouses have been invented, people are much fishier. (86.12)

It’s not enough to put on perfume: you are supposed to reapply it two or three times a day so that it won’t evaporate from your skin. And they actually take pride in that smell as if it were their own. (86.13)

Meanwhile, this trip has taught me how many of our possessions are superfluous and how easily we can lay them aside by choice, since when necessity deprives us of them we do not feel the loss. (87.1)

Lunch was without extras and took no more than an hour to prepare: dried figs go with me everywhere, and everywhere my writing tablets. If I have bread, the figs are my side dish; if not, they are my bread. They make every day the start of a new year; and I ensure that it is a happy new year too, with good thoughts and greatness of spirit. For our spirit is never greater than when it lays aside everything not its own. By fearing nothing, it finds peace; by desiring nothing, it finds wealth. (87.3)

I see there will be no end to this topic unless I just make an end. (87.11)

So it is true that what belongs to the most contemptible kinds of people is not a good. For that reason, I will never call freedom from pain a good: a cicada has that, and so does a flea. I will not even say that a quiet, untroubled existence is a good: what is more leisurely than a worm? What makes a person wise, you ask? The same thing as makes one a god. There must be something divine—exalted—great about him. (87.19)

Good things ought properly to be blameless. Goods are pure: they do not corrupt the mind, do not cause anxiety; they elevate and expand the mind but without conceit. Goods inspire confidence, riches inspire audacity; goods produce greatness of spirit, riches produce extravagance, which is nothing but a false show of greatness. (87.32)

One might say, “By this reasoning they will not even be advantages.” Advantages are of a quite different status from goods. An advantage is that in which there is more utility than annoyance; a good has to be a genuine good and innocent of any sort of harm. What is good is not that which is mostly beneficial but that which is entirely beneficial. Moreover, an advantage belongs also to animals and to imperfect people and to the foolish. This is touched have some disadvantage mixed in, but is called an advantage because it is evaluated by what is preponderant in it. A good belongs only to the wise person and is of necessity unadulterated. (87.36-37)

The word “poverty” refers not to possession but to subtraction (or, as the ancients called it, “privation”; in Greek kata steresin). It refers not to what something has but to what it does not have. Thus it is not possible for anything to be filled up from many instances of emptiness. Wealth is made up of numerous resources, not of numerous instances of scarcity. You do not properly understand what poverty is. Poverty is not the condition of possessing a few things but that of not possessing many things: its meaning is derived not from what it has but from what it lacks. —Antipater (87.39)

If we can, we should speak boldly; if not, then at least we should speak plainly. (87.41)

You ask what I think of the liberal arts. I have no special regard for any of them, nor do I consider any study a good one if its aim is moneymaking. (88.1)

There is only one study that is truly liberal, and that is the one that liberates a person, which is to say, the study of philosophy. It alone is exalted—powerful—great in spirit; all others a trifling and childish. (88.2)

You know whether a line is at a right angle: what use is that to you if you do not know what is right in life? (88.13)

“Is it really true that tomorrow will never take me by surprise? Surely what happens to a person without his knowledge does take him by surprise.” I do not know what will happen, but I do know what can happen. I exempt none of that from expectation: I expect all; and if I am spared any of it, I count myself fortunate. Tomorrow does take me by surprise, if it lets me off. Yet even then it does not surprise me; for just as I know there is nothing that cannot happen to me, so also I know that none of it is certain to happen. Thus I expect the best, but prepare for the worst. (88.17)

“What, then? Do the liberal studies have nothing to offer us?” Towards some ends they do contribute; but nothing toward virtue. (88.20)

Posidonius says there are four kinds of arts: these are the common and base arts, the arts of the entertainer, the arts of childhood, and the liberal arts. The common parts are those of workmen, which consist oil manual dexterity and are devoted to furnishing life’s basic needs. In these there is no attractiveness and no semblance of the honourable. The arts of the entertainer are those concerned with the pleasures of eye and ear. Among them you may count the engineers who devise stage floors that rise into view unaided, platforms that soar into the sky without making a sound, and other such extraordinary contrivances: gaps that open up where there was level floor before, or that close of their own accord, or raised sections that gradually lower onto themselves. These things are impressive to the eyes of those who have no familiarity with such matters, who marvel at every unexpected occurrence since they do not know what causes it. The arts of childhood have some similarity to the liberal arts. These are the ones the Greeks call “encyclical”; in our language, they are called “liberal”. But the only arts that are truly liberal—indeed, to be frank, the only arts that are truly free—are those whose concern is virtue. (88.21-23)

For by dealing with celestial phenomena our minds increase in scope and gain in elevation. (88.28)

“You people say that one cannot attain virtue without the liberal arts; how is it, then, that you maintain they contribute nothing to virtue?” Like this: one cannot attain virtue without food either, yet food has nothing to do with virtue; just as timber does not contribute anything to a ship even though one cannot make a ship except out of timber. My point is that you have no reason to think that one thing contributes to another just because the other cannot come into being without it. (88.31)

With so many big questions waiting to occupy our minds, we must make room for them by evicting those others that are superfluous. Virtues will not take up residence within such narrow confines: so large a guest needs elbow room. So let everything be driven out, and let the whole heart be open to virtue.

“Still, it is delightful to have familiarity with many different studies.” In that case, let us keep only as much of the, as we need. Or do you think reproach is justified when a person buys useless furnishings for his home and sets up a display of expensive objects, but not when someone busies himself with a superfluous array of literary studies? Wanting to know more than enough is a form of intemperance. The fact is, that way of pursuing the liberal arts makes men annoying, long-winded, pompous, self-satisfied: because they have earned what they do not need to know, they fail to learn what they do need. (88.35-37)

During the precipitate of Gaius Caesar, the literary scholar Apion made a tour of Greece and was adopted by all those cities in the name of Homer. He used to say that after Homer had completed his two themes, both the Odyssey and the Iliad, he added preface to his work in which he took in the tire Trojan War. As proof of this, he alleged that the first two letters in the first line of the Iliad were put there on purpose to signify the number of volumes in the work. That’s the kind of thing a polymath has to know! Just think: how much of your time is taken up by illness, by your business both public and private, by your daily routines, by sleep? Take the measure of your life: it does not have room for so many things. (88.40-42)

Let me tell you how much harm such excessive sophistication can do, and how far estranged it is from the truth. (88.43)

Nausiphanes claims that none of the things that appear real are any more real than unreal. Parmenides says that none of the things that appear to us are differentiated from the One. Zeno of Elea does away with the entire debate by declaring that nothing exists at all! The Pyrrhonists, the Megarians, the Eretrians, and the Academics are up to more or less the same thing: they have introduced that new form of knowledge which knows nothing at all. Cast them in, all of them, with the useless crowd of liberal studies! The first lot don’t provide me with any beneficial form of knowledge; the others don’t even leave me with any expectation of knowledge . . . one does not lift any lamp to direct my gaze toward the truth; the other gouges out my very eyes! If I believe Protagoras, there is nothing in the world that is not ambiguous; if I believe Nausiphanes, the one thing that is certain is that there is no certainty; if I believe Parmenides, nothing exists but the One; if I believe Zeno, not even the One. What are we, then? What are all these things that surround us, feed us, sustain us? The entire world is a shadow, either empty or deceptive. I can hardly say which makes me angrier, those who wanted us to know nothing, or those who did not even leave us the ability to know nothing. (88.43-46)

An extreme division is just as faulty as none at all: when anything is reduced to a powder, it ceases to have any structure at all. (89.3)

I will begin, then, if you don’t mind, by stating the difference between wisdom and philosophy. Wisdom is the human mind’s supreme good; philosophy is the love and aspiration for wisdom. The latter is proceeding towards the destination at which the former has arrived. (89.4)

[The Cyrenaics] divide ethics into give parts, dealing respectively with (1) proper objects of pursuit and avoidance, (2) emotions, (3) actions, (4) cases, and (5) arguments. The causes of things in fact belong to physics and arguments to logic, (89.12)

Since philosophy has three parts, let us begin by laying out its ethical part. Canonically, this is subdivided into three branches. The first assigns to each thing its proper value and determines what it is worth. This is an extremely useful investigation, for what is as needful as putting the price on things? The second deals with impulse, and the third with actions. That is to say, the objectives of ethics are first, to enable you to judge what each thing is worth second, to enable you to entertain a well-adjusted and controlled impulse with respect to them; and third, to enable you to achieve harmony between your impulse and your action so that you may be consistent in all your behaviour. (89.14)

A life is harmonious with itself only when action does not fall short of impulse and when impulse is generated on the basis of what each thing is worth, varying in intensity according to the worth of its objective. (89.15)

“It is I who should be saying to you, ‘when will you stop repeating your mistakes?’ Do you want the cure to end sooner than the malady?” (89.19)

The things I say will benefit you whether you like it or not. It’s time for a candid voice to reach you. (89.19)

What good are numerous bedrooms? You can only lie in one of them. Any place you do not occupy is not really yours. (89.21)

In your study, make it your aim not to know more, but to know better. (89.23)

Who can doubt, dear Lucilius, that our life is the gift of the mortal gods, but our living well is philosophy’s gift? Not would surely follow, then, that we owe more to philosophy than to the gods (since a good life is a greater benefit than mere life), were it not for the fact that philosophy itself has been bestowed on us by the gods. They have not granted knowledge of philosophy to anyone, but they have given everyone the capacity to acquire it. (90.1)

Once the human race becomes willing to give [Diogenes] a hearing, it will realize that cooks are as unnecessary as soldiers. (90.15)

We were born into a world where things were already prepared. We were the ones that made things difficult for ourselves by despising what was easy. Housing, clothing, the means of warming our bodies, food, and in fact everything that has now become s huge business was simply there, free for the taking and obtainable with little effort; for no one took more of anything than was needed. It is we who have made these things costly, strange, and only to be acquired by numerous and considerable technical skills. (90.18)

We toss and turn with anxiety on our purple bedclothes, kept awake by the sting of our cares. (90.41)

Houses nowadays make up a large part of our fears. (90.43)

There is a great difference between refusing to do wrong and not knowing how to do it. (90.46)

We live amid things that will die. (91.12)

Born unequal, we die equal. (91.16)

We are equal in that each of us is liable to every suffering: no one is more vulnerable than another; no one is more assured of surviving till tomorrow. (91.16)

“What you are complaining about is the same for everyone. I can’t give anyone anything easier, but anyone who wants to can make them easier for himself.” How so? By keeping himself serene. (91.18)

You are obliged to feel pain and thirst and hunger and, if you happen to be granted a longer duration among humankind, old age; you are obliged to grow sick, experience loss, and finally die. Still, there’s no reason for you to accept the views dinned into your ears by those around you. There’s nothing really harmful in these matters, nothing intolerable or harsh. Those people’s fear has no basis except that they are all in agreement about it. (91.18-19)

What I am saying is that a happy person is one who is not diminished by anything, who has a hold on all that maters, and relies on nothing but himself: one who depends on anything else for support is liable to fall. Otherwise things that are not our own will start to exercise much power over us. Who wants to rely on fortune, and what intelligent person flatters himself because of things that do not belong to him? (92.2)

What is a happy life? It is security and lasting tranquility, the sources of which are a great spirit and a steady determination to abide by a good decision. (92.3)

It is the doing that is honourable, not the actual things we do. (92.12)

Life includes advantages and disadvantages, both of them outside out control. If the good man is not miserable even though he is laden with every disadvantage , how is he not perfectly happy if he lacks some advantages? Just as the weight of disadvantages does not reduce him to misery, so the absence of advantages does not remove him from perfect happiness, he is as perfectly happy without advantages as he is free from misery under the weight of disadvantages. (92.16)

“But even the sun has its light blocked out by certain things.” Yet the sun is unimpaired, even when it is obstructed. (92.17)

There is a lot of difference between an impediment and a mere obstruction. (92.17)

In a mere instant it enjoys eternal blessings. (92.25)

Look: which do you think is fairer: for nature to obey you, or for you to obey nature? What does it matter how soon you leave a place that you have to leave evetually? What we nee to be concerned about is not how long we live but whether we live sufficiently. For a long life, you nee the help fate; but too live sufficiently, the essential thing is one’s character. A life is long if it is full, and it is full only when the mind bestows on itself the goodness that is proper to it, claiming for itself the authority over itself. What help are eighty years to a person who has spent his life doing nothing? Such a person has not lived; he has simply hung around in life. Rather than dying in old age, he has spent a long time in dying. (93.2-3)

So we should praise and congratulate the person whose time has been well invested, no matter how short that time has been. He has seen the true light, has not just been one of the crowd. (93.4-5)

Age is something external. How long I am to exist does not belong to me; what is mine is authentic experience. (93.7)

You are asking about the length of time of the most abundant life. It’s living until you have attained wisdom. Anyone who gets that far has achieved not the greatest length of life but the greatest goal of life. (93.8)

—Aristo’s Arguments—

One who has trained himself for life as a whole does not need to be advised on specifics. (94.3)

When something is blinding the mind and preventing it from seeing its priorities and obligations, it is pointless for someone to advise, ‘Live this way with your father , the way with you wife.’ Precepts will be of no use as long as the mind is clouded by error. Once this cloud is dispelled, one’s obligation in each in stance will become evident. Otherwise you are not curing the sick person but only relain him how a healthy person ought to behave. You are showing a poor person how to act rich: how can he do so while his poverty persists? You’re teaching a hungry person what he would do if he were well fed: instead, remove the hunger that gnaws at his vitals. My pint is the same concerning all faults: you have to remove them, not offer precepts, which cannot be effective while the faults themselves remain. (94.5-6)

You have to make the miser know that wealth is neither good nor bad; you have to show him wealthy people who are quite wretched. You have to make the coward know that whatever terrifies the general public is less frightful than it is rumoured to be, that no one is in pain for ever,” or dies more than once; that the great consolation about dying, which we are bound by the law too nature to suffer, is that no one has to suffer it twice; that the cure for pain is toughness of mind, which stubbornly faces trials and so makes them easier; that an excellent thing about pain id that when prolonged, it cannot be severe, and when severe, it cannot be prolonged; and finally the we must bravely accept everything necessity ordains. (94.7)

There are two reasons for out shortcomings: either wrong opinions have imbued the mind with bad intentions or, even if it has not been taken over by errors, it is inclined to them and if swiftly ruined when some impression leads it astray. So we must either completely cure the sick mind and free it from its faults, or forestall the mind that is still free from error but headed in the wrong direction. The principles of philosophy do both; therefore the entire business of giving precepts is useless. (94.13)

The only difference between the madness of people in general and the madness treated by doctors is that while the latter is an ailment due to disease, the former is due to false opinions (94.17)

—End of Aristo’s Arguments— 

Even when faults have been removed, we still need to learn what we ought to do and how to do it. (94.23)

It does not follow that philosophy cures nothing because it does not cure everything. (94.24)

“What’s the use of showing the obvious?” A great deal, because we sometimes do not apply our knowledge. A reminder does not teach, but it does call attention; it arouses us, focuses the memory and prevents it from slipping away. (94.25)

Don’t buy what you can use but what you need; for what you cannot use, a penny is too high a price. (94.27)

It is not only our emotions that stop us from acting according to our convictions but also out inexperience in discovering what each situation demands. (94.32)

There are two parts to virtue: one is the study of truth, and the other is action. (94.45)

Concord makes small things great; discord saps the strength of the mightiest. —Cato the Elder (94.46)

Philosophy is divided into the following parts: knowledge and mental disposition. A person who has learned and perceived what to do is not yet wise, not until the mind has been transformed into the things learned. (94.48)

Weaker characters need someone to go ahead of them and say: “This is what you should avoid; this is what you should do.” (94.50)

No word reaches out ears without doing us harm. (94.52)

Each person becomes corrupt in corrupting others. He learns bad habits, then teaches them, and so the worst opinions of each are compounded by contact with the others into one vast pile of depravity. (94.54)

So we should have a guardian to pluck our ear repeatedly, dismiss what people say, and protect against the praises of the many. You are mistaken if you think that our faults originate with us: they are heaped onto us by transmission. (94.55)

Nature does not predispose us to any fault; it has begotten us whole and free. It has not placed anything in the open to provoke our greed. It has put gold and silver beneath our feet, and granted us to crush and trample upon everything for which we ourselves are often crushed and trampled. Nature raised our faces to the sky, and wanted us to look up to everything splendid and wonderful it has made: the rising and setting of the heavenly bodies, the swift turning of the firmament, which reveals to us the earth by day and the heavens at night; the movements of the planets, which are slow if you compare them with that of the firmament but tremendously rapid if you consider the orbits they traverse with uninterrupted speed; the eclipses of the sun and moon when they obstruct each other; and other phenomena that are worthy of awe, both those that proceed according to a regular cycle and those that leap forth when activated by sudden causes, such as trails of fire in the night or flashes of light in the cloudless sky with no stroke of lightning or thunder; or pillars, beams, and all kinds of fiery phenomena. All these things nature has positioned above us; but gold, silver, and iron that for their sake never gives us peace, nature has hidden, as though it were bad for us to be entrusted with them. It is we who have brought them up into the light in order to fight over them; it is we who have unearthed both the causes and the instruments of our own dangers by excavating the heavy ground; it is we who have consigned our own misdeeds to fortune and who are not ashamed at setting the highest value on things that once lay in the depths of the earth. Do you want to know how specious is the gleam that has deceived your eyes? There is nothing filthier or darker than these metals all the time they lie buried and encrusted with slag. Of course not. Once they are hauled out through interminable and murky tunnels, nothing is uglier than they are during the process of refinement and separation from their own dross. Next, have a look at the workmen whose hands clean off this barren subterranean soil. See how much soot defiles them. But these metals befoul the mind more than the body, and there is greater filth in those who own them than the artisan. (94.56-59)

You should not believe that anyone comes fortunate the expense of another’s misfortune. (94.67)

You just need to notice how differently each person behaves in public from which he is by himself. (94.69)

What man dresses in purple raiment the will be shown to no one? Who feasts in secret on golden plates? Who lies down under th shade of some rural tree and displays his splendid luxury all alone? no one gets dressed up just for his own eyes . . . (94.70)

In opposition to those who extol influence and power, your preceptor should uphold a leisure devoted to study and a mind focused away from externals and bak towards its own concerns. (94.72)

We are wiser in adversity, for prosperity robs us of rectitude. (94.74)

There are many things we pretend to want when really we don’t. A public lecturer comes in with a huge text in tiny writing and tightly rolled up. He reads a lot of it, then says, “I will stop if you like.” “Keep going! Keep going!” comes the shout, from an audience that really wants him to shut up immediately. (95.2)

A scholar will not blush if e make a grammatical mistake deliberately, but will if he does so inadvertently. If a doctor does not realize that his patient is deteriorating, he is a worse practitioner than if he knows but pretends not to. But here in the art of living, voluntary faults are more blameworthy. (95.9)

Ever since scholars emerged, good people have been in short supply. Simple and obvious virtue changed into a difficult and devious science, teaching us how to debate instead of how to live. (95.13)

At one time medicine was the knowledge of a few herbs to check the flow of blood and help wounds to kit; then it gradually arrived at its present range of complexity. In the old days, not surprisingly, it had less work to do; for bodies were still firm and strong, living on simple food that had not been corrupted by artifice and a desire to titillate. Once food started to be sought not to relieve hunger but to arouse it, and countless seasonings had been discovered to stimulate gluttony, what used to nourish the hungry began to burden to overfed. Thence came pallor and the tremor of wine-sodden sinews, and the emaciation the comes of dyspepsia, more pitiful even than that which comes of malnutrition. Thence unsteady and towering steps, and a constant reeling just like that of actual intoxication. Thence fluid building up under all the skin, and a belly distended from the habit of exceeding its capacity. Thence an outbreak of jaundice, a discoloured face, the ooze of decaying organs, fingers disfigured by arthritis, numb and dysfunctional muscles, or the constant twitching of muscle spasms. Need I talk of dizziness, severe pains in the ey or the ear, raging headaches, and all the ulcerated parts within our excretory organs? There are also countless types of infection, and others again that arrive accompanied by shivering and violent shaking of our limbs. What need for me to mention countless other ailments, the punishments of luxury? (95.15-18)

Our illnesses are as bizarre as our manner of living. (95.19)

The greatest of doctors and the founder of medicine said that women do not lose their hair or have trouble with their feet. (95.20)

How disgusted people are with themselves when they breathe out last night’s drunken binge! You can be sure the their intake is rotting rather than being digested. (95.25)

Single dishes are considered shameful nowadays; different flavours are combined into one. What should take place in the belly is occurring at the table. I expect soon to see dishes being served that have already been chewed. (95.27)

Acts that are forbidden to private citizens are required as a matter of public policy. (95.30)

Just as the immortal gods did not learn any virtue, having been born with all of it, and just as it is in their nature to be good, so there are human beings who have been allotted a special disposition: without any long schooling, they arrive at conclusions that normally have to be taught, embracing honourable principles as soon as they have heard them. (95.36)

Moreover, just as a philosophical education accelerates the progress of those who are well inclined, so it will help those who are weaker and remove their harmful opinion.s (95.37)

Even supposing that someone is acting properly, if he doesn’t know why he is acting, he will not do it consistently and regularly. (95.39)

When Tiberius Caesar was sent a huge mullet (I don’t mind mentioning, to water some people’s mouths, that it supposedly weighed four and a half pounds), he ordered it to be taken to the market and sold, saying, “My friends, unless I am totally wrong, either Apicius or Publius Octavius will buy it.” His guess exceeded expectations. They placed their bids; Octavius won, and achieved huge game among his friends for spending five thousand sesterces on the fish that Caesar had sold and that even Apicius had not managed to but. (95.42)

The same acts may be either honourable or dishonourable: what counts is why or how they are done. Everything will be done honourably if we devote ourselves to what is honourable, and judge it and whatever depends on it to the the only good in human affairs. (95.43)

Hence a conviction needs to be instilled that applies to one’s life in its entirety. That is what I call a principle. As is the conviction, such will be one’s actions and thoughts; as these are, such will be one’s life. Advice on specifics is not enough for someone who is seeking to regulate the whole. (95.44)

I think you will accept that nothing is more reprehensible than wavering, indecision, and cowardly retreat. (95.46)

An action will not be right unless one’s intention is right, since that is the source of the action. The intention will not be right, in its turn, unless the mental disposition is right, since that is the source of the intention. Further, the mental disposition will not be optimal unless the person has grasped the laws of life as a whole, has settled on the judgements needing to be made about each thing—unless he has brought the truth to bear on his situation. (95.57)

Peace of mind depends on securing an unchanging and definite judgement. Other people constantly lose and regain their footing, as they oscillate between letting things go and pursuing them. (95.57)

Besides, those who do away with principles don’t understand that the very argument that does away with them confirms them. (95.60)

You are still annoyed about something; you still complain. Don’t you realise that the only really bad thing here is your annoyance and complaining? If you ask my opinion, nothing can be terrible for a man unless there is something in the natural course of things that he thinks is terrible. (96.1)

“I did want to go on living, but without all these problems.” Such an effeminate tone is a disgrace to a man. (96.4)

You are mistaken, dear Lucilius, if you think that our era is particularly capable for self-indulgence and for neglect of high moral standards. One likes to blame such deficiencies on one’s own times, but in reality it is not the times that are at fault but the people. (97.1)

In life, wrongdoing is a source of positive delight. It’s this that makes most people impossible to correct. (97.10)

All people do conceal their misdeeds. However well those things turn out, they hide the facts while they enjoy the profits. That tells you that even people who have gone utterly astray still have some sense of what’s right; they are not ignorant of what’s wrong, they just disregard it. (97.12)

For the mind is more powerful than every act of fortune: by itself the mind guides its affairs one way or the other, and is the cause of a happy or unhappy life for itself. A bad mind turns everything into bad, even things that have arrived looking excellent. A mind that is upright and sound corrects fortune’s wrongs, softens its hardness and roughness with the knowledge of how to endure, receives prosperity in face of adversity. (98.2-3)

A mind that is anxious about the future and unhappy before misfortune even arrives is a disaster, concerned about the things it delights in should last forever. It will never be in repose, and in its anticipation of what is to come it will lose the present things that it could enjoy. The fear of losing something is equivalent to the pain of its loss. (98.6)

Those who suffer before there is need suffer more than they need to. (98.8)

Yet people are so flawed and so heedless of the destination to which the passage of each day is pushing them that they are caught by surprise when they lose something, even though on a single day they will lose everything. (98.10)

Tell yourself, “These thing that seem so terrifying can all be overcome.” Many people have overcome particular trials: Mucius overcame fire, Regulus torture, Socrates poison, Rutilius exile, and Cato death by the sword. Let us too overcome something. (98.12)

Why have we given up? Why have we lost hope? . . . We can get back on track, we can recover a sound condition. (98.14)

For when a person has trouble dealing with some great affliction, one should make concessions for a little while, until grief expends itself or at least exhausts its initial force; but those who take it upon themselves to grieve should be reprimanded at the outset and should learn that even tears can sometimes be ridiculous. (99.1)

We go looking for reasons to grieve; we wish to complain of our lot even when it is unfair to do so, as if we were never to have just cause to complain. And yet, in truth, you had always seemed to me brave enough to handle even substantial misfortunes. (99.3)

If you had suffered the greatest loss of all—that is, if you had lost a friend—even then your endeavour should have been to rejoice in having had a friend rather than grieve over having lost one. (99.3)

Life in itself is neither good nor bad; it is only the setting for good and bad. (99.12)

Let what flows be what emotion forces from us . . . (99.15)

My purpose was, rather, to chide you for having forgotten yourself for a short time, and to encourage you to be bold against fortune hereafter. (99.32)

Material that we like because of the speaker’s energy is generally less attractive when we read it. (100.3)

All his work has progress as its goal, and excellence of mind. It does not look for applause. (100.11)

What is more foolish than being surprised that an event that could happen every day has happened on a particular day? (101.7)

By putting the final touch on one’s life every day, you don’t lack time . . . We are constantly in the grip of panic as to how much is left or what the future holds. How shall we escape this turmoil? There is only one way—by not allowing our life to look to the future but gathering it into itself. People hang on the future because they are frustrated by the present . . . And so, dear Lucilius, make haste to live, and treat each day as a life in itself. A person who prepares himself like this, making the daily round his entire life, is quite secure. Those who live on hope find every present moment slipping away; they are taken over by greed and the fear of death, a most miserable state that makes everything else quite miserable. (101.8-10)

It should not be our project to discuss minutiae and drag philosophy down from its majesty into these petty matters. (102.20)

The day that you dread as your last is the birthday of your eternity. (102.26)

Set down your burden. Why do you delay? Did you not once before abandon a body in which you were hiding and come out? . . . When you were send forth from the warm and soft poultice of your mother’s womb, a freer air breathed upon you . . . Calmly dismiss your now unneeded limbs, and lay aside this body that you have so long inhabited. It will be torn apart, crushed, and destroyed. Why are you sad? This is the way things are. The afterbirth always perishes. Why do you love it as though it were your own? It was just your overing. The day will come that will tear you forth and take you away from association with this foul and evil-smelling belly. (102.26-27)

Estrange yourself even now from the body, and contemplate something higher and more sublime. (102.28)

After you have gazed with your entire being on the fullness of light, you will admit that you have lived in the dark. (102.28)

Think of how much we benefit from good examples. You will then realize that the memory of great men is no less useful than their presence. (102.30)

It’s a mistake to trust the faces of the people you meet: they have the appearance of human beings but the character of wild animals. (103.2)

Withdraw into philosophy as much as you can. Philosophy will protect you; you will be safe, or at least safer, in philosophy’s sanctuary. (103.4)

You should use philosophy to remove your faults, not to criticise other people’s. (103.5)

I feel fully myself again now, without a trace of physical unsteadiness and mental weakness. I’m beginning to concentrate completely on my studies. (104.6)

For that, location is of no avail unless the mind makes time for itself, keeping a place of retreat even amid busy moments. On the contrary, if you’re always choosing remote spots in a. Quest for leisure, you’ll find something to distract you everywhere. We are told that Socrates have the following response to someone who complained that travel had done him no good: “It serves you right—you’ve been traveling with yourself!” How well some people would be doing if they could get away from themselves. Their pressures and anxieties and failings and terrors are all due to themselves. (104.7-8)

Look on everything that pleases you the same way as you look at verdant leaves: enjoy them while they last. One or another of them will fall as the days p[ass, but their loss is easy to bear, because leaves grow again. It’s no different with the loss of those you love and this of as your life’s delight. They can be replaces, even though they are not reborn.

“But they will not be the same.” Even you yourself will not be the same. Every day changes you., and every hour; but when other people are snatched away the change is quite obvious, whereas in your own case this escapes notice, because it is not happening on the outside. Other people are taken from us, but at the same time we are being stolen imperceptibly from ourselves. You will not be conscious of these changes, nor will you be able to remedy the afflictions, but you will nonetheless make trouble for yourself by hoping for some things and despairing of others. Wisdom lies in combining the two: you should neither hope without doubting nor doubt without hoping. (104.12)

There is only one haven for this stormy and turbulent life of ours: to rise above future events, to stand firm, ready to receive the blows of fortune head-on, out in the open and unflinching. Nature brought us forth to be resolute. It made some creatures fierce, others cunning, and others timid, but its gift to us was a proud and lofty spirit that seeks where it may live most honourably rather than most safely; a spirit that closely resembles that of the universe, which it follows and strives to match, as far as that is permissible to the steps of mortal beings. This spirit advances itself, it is confident of being praised and highly regarded. It is master of everything and superior to everything. Consequently, it should not submit to anything or find anything heavy enough to weigh man down. (104.22-24)

Many things that seem terrifying at night turn out to be amusing in the daylight. (104.24)

I frequently encounter people who think that what they themselves cannot do is impossible, and who say that our Stoic theories are beyond the capacities of human nature. I myself have a much higher opinion of human beings: they are actually capable of doing these thing, but they are unwilling. Has anyone who really made the effort ever found the task beyond him? Hasn’t it always been found easier in the doing? It is not the difficulty of things that saps our confidence, but our lack of confidence that creates the difficulty. (104.25-26)

When one faction was leaning to Caesar , and the other to Pomepy, Cato was the only one who took the part of the Republic. (104.30)

What will be most helpful in general is to stay calm, talk very little with other people but a great deal with yourself. (105.6)

We are wasting our minds on trivialities, things that make people clever rather than good. To be wise is something more obvious, or rather, more straightforward. You don’t need a lot scholarly study to achieve mental excellence. Yet we are squandering philosophy itself, just as we squander our other resources on what is trivial. In scholarly study, as in everything else, we suffer from excess. We are learning not for life but for the classroom. (106.11-12)

Life is not a bed of roses. You have set out on a long road n you are bound to trip up, collide, fall down, get tired, and exclaim, “I’m ready to die”—which will be a lie . . . Does he really wish to die? Let him prepare himself for all that lies ahead, knowing that he has come to the place where thunder resounds, where

Wails and avenging cares have made their beds,

Where wan diseases dwell and grim old age. —Aeneid, 6, 274-5

This is the company in which you have to spend your life. You cannot escape these things, but you can rise above them, and you will succeed in doing so if you frequently reflect on and anticipate the future. Everyone has greater fortitude in arriving at a situation for which he has long prepared himself, and hardships that have been anticipated can also be withstood. In contrast, utterly trivial things can terrify people who are not prepared for them. We must see to it that we have not overlooked anything. Because everything is more serious when it is new, constant reflection will ensure that you do not face any rouble as a raw recruit. (107.2,3-4)

Don’t drink as much as you want, but as much as you can hold. (108.2)

The more the mind takes in, the larger it becomes. (108.2)

Some people come not to learn but only to listen. It is like when we are enticed into the theatre to delight our ears with speech or song or story. (108.6)

They are not seeking to lay aside any of their faults or to adopt any rule of life by which to regulate their habits, but only to find enjoyment in the pleasures of the ear. Some even come with notebooks, not to record the content but to take down phrases that they can then repeat, with no more benefit to others than they have derived themselves. (108.6)

Some habits are easier to break than to reduce. (108.16)

How much of a loss is it for you to refrain from savagery? I am only depriving you of the food of lions and of vultures. —Sotion (108.21)

But there is also some wrongdoing, both on the part of the instructors, when they teach us how to argue a point and not how to live, and on the part of students, when their purpose in attending is not to improve their minds but to develop their rhetorical talent. Hence what used to be philosophy has now become mere philology.

It matters a great deal what one’s purpose is in approaching any field of study. When the prospective literary scholar examines his copy of Virgil, and reads that exceptional line,

Time flies on irretrievable —Georgics, 3.284

his thought is not “We must take care—if we do not make haste, we will be left behind—the fleeting moment hurries on, and hurries us— heedlessly are we swept along—we are always procrastinating—opportunity hurtles by and still we make delays.” No, he reads it just so that he can observe that every time Virgil speaks about the rapid movement of time, he uses the word “flies” (fugitive), as follows:

The best times of our lives, poor mortal creatures,

fly first away, and in their place come illness

and sad old age and suffering and pain,

until hard pitiless death takes us away. —Georgics, 3.66-68

The person who looks to philosophy takes these same lines and applies them as he ought. “The reason Virgil never says that time ‘passes’, but always that it ‘flies’, is that flying is the quickest kind of movement, and his point is that the best people are the first to be taken away. Why not quicken our own steps to match the pace of that swiftest of all runner? Our better days are hastening on; worse days will follow. Our life is like a storage jar: the purest of its contents are decanted first; all the sediment and turbid matter sink to the bottom. Are we going to let the best of our lives be siphoned off for others, and keep only the dregs for ourselves? Keep these lines always in mind; let them be to you as an oracular response:

The best times of our lives, poor mortal creatures,

fly first away.

Why the best? Because what remains is uncertain. Why the best? Because when we are young, we are able to learn, since our minds are still flexible and can be turned toward better thing; because this is the time of life that is suited to strenuous effort, to exercising the mind with study and the body with work. What remains is slower, wearier, nearer to the end. Let us therefore forget all our diversions and aim for this ne thing with all our mind, lest we come too late to understand the rapidity of fleeting time, which we cannot detain,  let us be pleased with each new day as the best at life will give us, and so add it to our store. Life is flying away; we must catch it”

The one who reads with the eye of a literary scholar does not consider why the best times of our lives come first—that in their place comes illness, that old age looms over us even while we are still intent on our youth. Instead, he says that Virgil always uses the words “illness” and “old age” together. So he does, and with good reason. For old age is an illness that has no cure. (108.23-28)

But of all those who have done humankind a bad turn, the worst are those who teach philosophy for money, as if it were some tradesman’s craft, and then live their lives in a manner very different from their precepts. For, being prime examples of the very faults they criticise ion others, they provide a fine demonstration of how useless their teaching is. Such instruction cannot do me any good . . . (108.37)

I don’t need someone to talk at me; I need someone to steer. (108.37)

People are more perceptive in the business of others than they are in their own. (109.16)

I send you greetings from my villa at Nomentum, wishing you excellence of mind. (110.1)

If you carefully study human circumstances as they really are rather than as they are described, you will realize the more often than not, our troubles do us no real harm. (110.3)

You should limit your enjoyment and at the same time your fear. It’s worth not enjoying anything for long so as to avoid fearing anything for long. (110.4)

We have devoted our minds to pleasure (indulging in which is the beginning of all troubles), and surrendered ourselves to ambition, fame, and equally worthless and useless things. (110.10)

Why are you impressed and all agape? It’s just a show. People don’t own these things, they display them; and in the very moment they give us pleasure, they are also passing away. Turn yourself instead toward real riches. Learn to be satisfied with little, and loudly and spiritedly proclaim:

We have water, we have porridge, let us compete for happiness with Jupiter himself. —Attalus (110.17-18)

The free person is not the one over whom often has little power, but the one against whom fortune is powerless. This is the truth—if you want to challenge Jupiter, who has no wants, you must want nothing. —Attalus (110.20)

This is what Attalus told us, and what nature has told everyone. If you make the effort to reflect frequently on these things, you will strive to be happy, not seem happy—that is, to seem happy to yourself and not to others. (110.20)

When a person has taken up philosophy as a treatment for himself, he enlarges his mind and exudes confidence. (111.2)

“But he says he is tired of his way of life.” No denying that; who isn’t? (111.4)

I myself am both an animate creature and a human being, yet you will not say that there are two of us. Why not? Because the two would have to be separate. I mean that one would have to be disjoined from the other, to constitute two. Anything that is multiple in a single entity falls under a single nature. Hence it is single. My mind is an animate creature, and so am I, but we are not two. Why not? Because my mind is a part of me. Something will only be counted by itself when it stands on its own. As long as it is a component of something else, it cannot be regarded as a different thing. Why. Not? Because that which is a different thing muse be a thing in its own right, having its own distinctive property and being complete in itself. (113.4-5)

I think I am wasting effort on something obvious, something to be annoyed about rather than to debate. (113.15)

The virtues, as you Stoics say, are equal. (113.16)

You should never think that the weapons of fortune will make you safe: fight with your own! Fortune does not arm us against fortune itself. Hence men who are equipped to resist the enemy are unarmed to resist fortune. —Posidonious (113.28)

It’s the familiar saying, proverbial among the Greeks: as we live, so do we speak. (114.1)

If the mind is healthy, well put together, serious, self-controlled . . . (114.3)

This is the man who at the height of civil wars, with the city armed and in turmoil, came among the people escorted by pair of eunuchs—who were more masculine than he was. (114.6)

Novelty and changes in the accustomed order become the fashion: what once was dessert becomes an appetiser; what used to be served while the guests were arriving now follows them out the door. (114.9)

Their faults are so closely intermingled with their excellences that removing one would remove the other. (114.12)

You see what happens when someone takes a fault as a model for imitation. (114.19)

You can infer a person’s disposition only from his own faults, those arising from himself. When he is angry, his language is likewise angry; when he is upset, his language is excessively vehement; when he is a fop, his language is languid and loose-limbed. (114.20)

That drunkenness of his prose (what else can I call it?) does not affect a person unless his mind is already slipping. (114.23)

If the mind is healthy and sound, its language is likewise sturdy, strong, and virile; if the mind stumbles, the rest collapses as well.

Preserve their king, and all are of one mind;

if he is lost, they break their faith. —Virgil, Georgics, 4.212-213 (114.23)

Look at our kitchens, with so many ovens, and cooks running this way and that between them: can you believe it is just one belly, when all this commotion is preparing a meal for it? Look at our wine cellars, our warehouses filled with many generations of vintages: can you believe it is just one belly, when the wines of so many years and regions are laid by for its use? Look how many places the soil is tilled, how many thousands of peasants are at work plowing and hoeing: an you believe it is just one belly, when fields are sown for it both in Sicily and in North Africa? When will we be whole and sound? When will we moderate our desires? When each one of us takes a count of himself and a measure of his own body; and realises how little he can really contain and for how short a time. But nothing will do as much to help you toward self-control in all things as the reflection that life is short, and the little we have of it is uncertain. In every act, keep your eyes on death. (114.26-27)

I prefer that you not be too anxious about words and sentence structure, dear Lucilius. I have more important things for you to worry about. Ask yourself what you are writing, not how; and even for the content your aim should be not to write it but to feel it, and to take those thoughts and impress them more deeply upon yourself, like a seal. (115.1)

If we should examine the mind of a good man, O what a beautiful, what a sacred sight we would see! What grandeur, hat calm would shine forth in it, and what constellations of the virtues: justice on one side, courage on the other, moderation and prudence over there. Besides these, frugality, self-control, endurance, generosity, and cheerfulness would shed their light upon it, and human kindness, which (hard as it is to believe) is in fact a rarity among human beings. Foresight too, and refinement, and most outstanding of all, greatness of spirit: what grace, and, by god, what dignity would these bestow. How great its authority would be, and how much appreciated: behold this countenance, more lofty and more radiant than anything in human life is won’t to be, would he not stop, astonished as buy the advent of a deity, and utter a voiceless prayer of propitiation for the sight, then summoned by the benevolence of that visage, step forward into adoration and worship? Then after gazing for a long time at that aspect, so high exalted above anything in our experience, at those eyes beaming with a gentle light yet also with living fire, he would at last, in fear and wonder, exclaim in the words of out poet Virgil:

Maiden, how shall I name you? For your face

is not that of a mortal, and your voice

has not a human sound. Be kind, then,

and lighten all my labours. —Virgil, Aeneid, 1.327-328, 330 (115.3-5)

Only then will we be in a position to understand what worthless items we admire. (115.8)

We deceive our own eyes: when we gild a ceiling, are we not rejoicing in a lie? . . . Look at all those who strut about in high places: their prosperity is nothing but gilding. Examine it closely and you will see how much rottenness is hidden beneath that thin coating os status. (115.9)

We ask not what a thing is but what it costs. (115.10)

The palace of the Sun was high on lofty columns,

Splendid with shining gold. —Ovid, Metamorphoses, 2.1-2 (115.12)

Even in Greek tragedy there are those who for a profit would put up their innocence, their health, even their good name.

Let me be called a scoundrel, but a rich one.

We all ask if he’s rich, not if he’s good.

Not why you have it, not the place you got it, but just how much—that’s what they want to know.

In all the world, a man’s worth what he owns.

What should one be ashamed of? Having nothing.

Let me live rich, or let me die a pauper.

To die while making money; that’s a blessing.

Money’s the vast good of the human race. It is more pleasant than a mother’s love, a baby’s touch, the reverence due a father. If Venus’s face can match this lovely sparkle, she well deserves the loves of gods and men.

When this last speech was delivered in Euripides’ tragedy, the entire populace leapt to its feet, with the single aim of driving both actor and play from the theatre, until Euripides himself jumped on the stage and begged the audience to wait and see how that admirer of gold would come out. Bellerophon got his just deserts in that story, and so does every person in his own. For greed never goes unpunished. Yet greed in itself is punishment enough. (115.14-15) [Sources of the first seven quotes unknown]

So this is what philosophy will do for you—and indeed, I think it is the greatest gift of all: you will never regret what you have done. (115.18)

[Cf. To be able to enjoy one's past life is to live twice —Martial 10.23.7]

The question has often been raised whether it is better to have moderate emotions or none at all. Philosophers of our school exclude them altogether, whereas the Peripatetics restrain them. I myself don’t see how it can be healthy or useful to have even a moderate amount of an illness. (116.1)

Nature has endowed us with a concern for ourselves but once we indulge this concern excessively, it become a fault. (116.3)

Nature infused the necessities of life with pleasure, not so that we would pursue pleasure, but so that the supervening pleasure would make what is indispensable more welcome to us. If the pleasure is pursued for its own sake, it becomes self-indulgence. (116.3)

Let us, then, resist emotions as soon as they start to come in, since, as I said, it’s easier to refuse them admission than to get them to leave. (116.3)

In fact, though, there’s something else involved: our love for our own faults. We defend them and we would rather make excuses for them than shake them off. Human nature has been endowed with sufficient strength if only we use it. We have only to assemble our resources and get them all to fight on our behalf rather than against us. Inability is just an excuse; the real reason is unwillingness. (116.8)

By posing such trifling questions to me, you will keep me very busy, and without realising it, you will involve me in a lot of argument and trouble. (117.1)

You should not draw comparisons between things that are intrinsically different. (117.15)

Wisdom is the disposition of a perfected mind, and being wise is the use of a perfected mind. (117.16)

Are we, I beg you, going to waste our effort on something that may be false and is certainly useless? We ned that effort—we owe it to greater and better things. (117.20)

It is in your power to die whenever you wish. (117.22)

I just read a most shocking opening of a supposedly eminent rhetorician’s speech: “If only I could die as soon as possible!” Madman, you are praying for what is already yours. (117.23)

A person who prays for death does not really want to die. Ask the gods for life and health. But if what you want is to die, death has this benefit: you o longer need to pray. (117.24)

These should be our reflections, dear Lucilius, these are the ways to shape our minds. (117.25)

No one is ignorant of the fact that what is in the future is not good, precisely because it is in the future. Anything good is necessarily beneficial and only present things can benefit. Something that doe not benefit is not good, while if it does benefit, it is already so. I am to be wise in the future. That will be a good for me when I am wise, but meanwhile it is not. Something must exist before it can take on a certain quality. (1178.27)

Nature has not been so kind and generous in the time it has given us that we can afford to waste any. Take a look at how many moments the most careful people lose. Each person loses some time to illness, either to his own or in his family; some time goes to essential business, some to civic duties; and sleep takes up a part of our life. When our time is so compressed and rushed and fleeting, who good is it to waste the greater part of it on trivialities? (117.32)

Consider too that the mind prefers to amuse itself rather than restore its health, making philosophy into entertainment when it is really a cure. (117.33)

I don’t know the difference between wisdom and being wise. I do know that it makes no difference whether I know this or not. Tell me: when I have learned what the difference is, will I then be wise? Why, then, do you keep me burst with the terminology of wisdom rather than with the acts of wisdom? (117.33)

[Cf. Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one. —Marcus Aurelius, 10.16]

The fine thing to do, my dear Lucilius, the course of safety and freedom, is to seek no office at all, to bypass all fortune’s elections . . . What a mental achievement it is to be the only person who seeks nothing, asks no favours from anyone and says, “Fortune, you and I have nothing to with each other. I grant you mop power over me. I know that men like Cato are rejected by you, while you create the likes of Vatinius. I do not ask you for anything.” This is the way to remove fortune from office. (118.3,4)

Everyone suffers from not knowing the truth. Misled by talk, they are drawn toward things they take to be good; and then, after achieving them and suffering greatly, they discover them to be bad or worthless or less than they had expected. Most people are impressed by things that deceive them from a distance, and “good” is commonly equated with “big.” (118.7)

Now watch my words. What is good is in accordance with nature, but what is in accordance with nature is not immediately good as well. Many things, in fact, agree with nature but are too paltry for the term “good” to benefit them. They are trivial and contemptible. There is no tiny and contemptible good. (118.12)

As long as something is insignificant, it is not good. (118.12)

Do you want to know what it is I have discovered? Get our your wallet—it’s a terrific deal: I am going to teach you how to get rich in the fastest way possible. You can’t wait to hear this, can you? You’re quite right: I will show you a shortcut to fantastic wealth. But you are going to need a financial backer. In order to do business, you must take out a loan, only not, please, through an agent; I don’t want the brokers gossiping about you. I have a backer ready and waiting to give you, the one Cato recommends in his dictum: “You should borrow from yourself.” (119.1-2)

No matter how small the amount, it will be enough if only we get what we need from ourselves. Dear Lucilius, not wanting is just as good as having. The result is the same in both cases: either way, you will avoid anxiety. It’s not that I am advising you to deny your nature—for nature is obdurate: to cannot be conquered; it demands its due. You should understand, rather, that everything that goes beyond nature is a favour and not a necessity. I am hungry, so I have to eat. Nature does not care whether the bread is coarse or of the finest flour: its interest is not in pleasing the stomach but merely in filling it. I am thirsty, but nature does not care whether I take water from the nearest pool or whether it is water I have chilled in a pile of snow. All that nature commands is benching the thirst. It does not matter whether my cup is made of gold, crystal, or agate, or whether it is just a Tibur cup, or even the hollow of my hand. Look to the ultimate point of everything, and then you will let go of the extras. Hunger summons me, my hand should reach for the nearest food. Hunger will make anything I find acceptable. There’s nothing a starving person will reject. (119.1-4)

Are you still wondering what it is that I am so pleased about? It was finding this splendid saying: (119.5)

Would you rather have a large amount, or enough? Those who have. Large amount want more, which is a proof that they do not yet have enough. The one who has enough has attained the one thing the rich can never get: a stopping point. (119.6)

What is sufficient is never too little, and what is insufficient is never a lot. (119.7)

The eyes of the people are blinded and captivated by wealth. (119.11)

Nothing is good that can be used badly. (120.3)

Whatever it is, this is mine to do. it is rough and tough, so let's get busy. (120.12)

He had a mind that was perfect and at the peak of its condition. (120.14)

Indeed, we are already dying. Every day we stand closer to our last, and every our thrusts us toward the place from which we are bound to fall. See what blindness afflicts our minds. What I call the future is happening right now, and a large part of it is already past. For the time we have lived is already where it was before we were alive.we ware wrong to fear our last day: each day contributes the same amount o death. (120.17-18)

The best evidence of abad character is variability and constant shifting between pretence of virtues and love of vices. (120.20)

Every man changes his plans and aspirations by the day. One day he wants to have a wife, the next only a girlfriend. Now he wants to lord it over people, but another time he is more obsequious than a slave in his behaviour. Now he is so self-aggrandising as to attract resentment, but on another occasion he is more self-effacing than those of lowest degree . . . This is the clearest indication of a ind that lacks good sense. (120.21,22)

You will not understand what you should do and what you should avoid until you have learned what you owe to your own nature. (121.3)

Our question is whether it can understand these thing, not how it does so. (121.19)

This art is innate, not learned. (121.23)

It’s a disgrace to lie half-asleep when the sun is already high in the sky, and only start the day at the noon hour. For many people, even noon counts as predawn! (122.1)

Others invert the functions of day and night: their eyes are still sodden with yesterday’s drinking bout, and they don’t open them until evening approaches. (122.2)

When people follow nature, they are straightforward, unencumbered, and largely similar. The perverted ones are very much at odds with others and with themselves. (122.17)

Follow nature, and everything is easy and accessible; strain against it, and you will live like a rower pulling against the current. (122.19)

Nothing is serious if one takes it lightly, nothing needs to be annoying, provided that one don’t add ones own annoyance to it. (123.1)

No one can have everything. (123.3)

If only a few people did something, we would refuse to copy them; yet as soon as more people take up the practice, we adopt it as well, as if mere frequency somehow made it more honourable. Once a misconception becomes widespread, we let it stand in for rectitude. (123.6)

We should avoid conversation with all these people. They are the sort who pass on their faults and trade them with one another . . . Conversation with them does a lot of harm. For even if it has no immediate effect, it leaves seeds in the mind; it stays with us even after we have left their company, a bad effect that will rise up again later on. (123.8)

After listening to a concert, people’s ears are still full of the melody and of the sweet singing that restricts their ability to think and make them unable to focus on serious matters. In the same way, the talk of flatterers and those who encourage vice lingers long after it is heard. It is not easy to shake the mind free from a sweet sound. (123.9)

How much better it is to follow a straight path and let it finally guide you to the point where only what is honourable gives you pleasure! (123.12)

These are the lessons you need to learn or, rather, take to heart. (123.17)

I can convey the wisdom of the ancients

to you . . . —Virgil, Georgics, 1.176-177 (124.1)

Reason settles questions about the happy life, virtue, and the honourable, and likewise about the good and the bad. By letting the senses make pronouncements about the good, our opponents allow the least valuable part to pass judgement on the superior.(124.4)

Only when it gets to reason will it get to the good. (124.8)

Old age is doing well if it arrives after long and concentrated study. (1245.12)

There are four natures to be considered here, those of trees, animals, humans, and gods. The latter two are of the same nature insofar as they are rational, but they also differ in that one of them is mortal and the other is immortal. The good o one of them—that would be the god, of course—iOS perfected just by nature; in the other, namely, the human, it is perfected by effort. The rest, which lack reason, are prefect in their own nature, not truly perfect. (124.14)

There is no vice in anyone who lacks the possibility of virtue. (124.19)

A mind made flawless, a mind that rivals the divine, that elevates itself above the human sphere and places nothing beyond itself . . . Do not judge yourself to be happy until all your joys arise from yourself, until, after viewing the objects of human competition, covetousness, and possessiveness, you find—I will not say nothing to prefer, but nothing to set your heart on. (124.23,24)

One could not help but speak that way, when such was one’s reading material. (Fragment from Book 22 in Aulus Gellius, 12.2.11, 12.2.2-10)