Letters on Ethics: To Lucilius (The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca)

by Seneca

A person is not poor, I think, as long as what little he has left is enough for him.

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

Worse yet, we have the authority of grown men but the faults of children, of infants even. Children are terrified of trivial things, infants of imagined things, and we of both.

Everything we need is already at hand. Anyone who is on good terms with poverty is rich.

Animals in the wild flee the dangers they see and are tranquil once they have escaped; we, though, are tormented both by what is to come and by what has been. Often, our goods do us harm: memory recalls the stab of fear; foresight anticipates it. No one is made wretched merely by the present.

Anyone who does not think that what he has is plenty, is miserable, even if he is ruler of the entire world.*

Here is when you may know that you are free of all desires: when you get to the point that you no longer ask God for anything except what you could ask for openly.

live with humans as if God may be watching; speak with God as if humans may be listening.

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.*

So let us arrange our minds in such a way that whatever circumstances require is what we want—and especially that we think about our own end without sadness. 4 We should prepare for death even before we prepare for life.

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.