Seneca's Letters from a Stoic

by Seneca

philosophy teaches us to act, not to speak; it

exacts of every man that he should live according to his own standards, that his life should not be out of harmony with his words, and that, further, his inner life should be of one hue and not out of harmony with all his activities.

This, I say, is the highest duty and the highest proof of wisdom, – that deed and word should be in accord, that a man should be equal to himself u...

Observe yourself, then, and see whether your dress and your house are inconsistent, whether you treat yourself lavishly and your family meanly, whether you eat frugal dinners and yet build luxurious houses. You should lay hold, once for all, upon a single norm to live by, and should regulate your whole life according to this norm. Some men restrict themselves at home, but strut with swelling port before the public; such discordance is a fault, and it indicates a wavering mind which cannot yet keep its balance.

"What is wisdom? Always desiring the same things, and always refusing the same things."

The belly will not listen to advice; it makes demands, it importunes. And yet it is not a troublesome creditor; you can send it away at small cost, provided only that you give it what you owe, not merely all you are able to give. Farewell.

Take anyone off his guard, young, old, or middle-aged; you will find that all are equally afraid of death, and equally ignorant of life.

Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long.

The frail body, also, even though we can accomplish nothing without it, is to be regarded as necessary rather than as important; it involves us in vain pleasures, short-lived, and soon to be regretted, which, unless they are reined in by extreme self-control, will be transformed into the opposite. This is what I mean: pleasure, unless it has been kept within bounds, tends to rush headlong into the abyss of sorrow.

It is indeed foolish to be unhappy now because you may be unhappy at some future time.

Let us think of everything that can happen as something which will happen.

There is an end to nothing; all things are connected in a sort of circle; they flee and they are pursued. Night is close at the heels of day, day at the heels of night; summer ends in autumn, winter rushes after autumn, and winter softens into spring; all nature in this way passes, only to return. I do nothing new; I see nothing new; sooner or later one sickens of this, also."

"The time when you should most of all withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd."

What you have done in the past will be manifest only at the time when you draw your last breath.

You are younger; but what does that matter? There is no fixed count of our years. You do not know where death awaits you; so be ready for it everywhere.

When we can never prove whether we really know a thing, we must always be learning it.

He who has learned to die has unlearned slavery; he is above any external power, or, at any rate, he is beyond it. What terrors have prisons and bonds and bars for him? His way out is clear. There is only one chain which binds us to life, and that is the love of life. The chain may not be cast off, but it may be rubbed away, so that, when necessity shall demand, nothing may retard or hinder us from being ready to do at once that which at some time we are bound to do.

"Real wealth is poverty adjusted to the law of Nature."

You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.

your faults will follow you whithersoever you travel.

What pleasure is there in seeing new lands? Or in surveying cities and spots of interest? All your bustle is useless. Do you ask why such flight does not help you? It is because you flee along with yourself. You must lay aside the burdens of the mind; until you do this, no place will satisfy you.

The person you are matters more than the place to which you go; for that reason we should not make the mind a bondsman to any one place. Live in this belief: "I am not born for any one corner of the universe; this whole world is my country."

The wise man will endure all that, but will not choose it; he will prefer to be at peace rather than at war.

you must discover yourself in the wrong before you can reform yourself.

And much harm is done even by one who holds you back, especially since life is so short; and we make it still shorter by our unsteadiness, by making ever fresh beginnings at life, now one and immediately another. We break up life into little bits, and fritter it away. 3.

remembering continually what a noble thing it is to round out your life before death comes, and then await in peace the remaining portion of your time, claiming nothing for yourself, since you are in possession of the happy life; for such a life is not made happier for being longer.

it may have no need of added years. He has at length passed beyond all necessities – he has won his honourable discharge and is free, – who still lives after his life has been completed.

Only the poor man counts his flock.

niggardly

And death, which we fear and shrink from, merely interrupts life, but does not steal it away; the time will return when we shall be restored to the light of day;

You must die erect and unyielding. Moreover, what profit is it to gain a few days or a few years? There is no discharge for us from the moment we are born.

You cannot escape necessities, but you can overcome them

It is the quality of a great soul to scorn great things and to prefer that which is ordinary rather than that which is too great. For the one condition is useful and life-giving; but the other does harm just because it is excessive. Similarly,

Therefore, the ultimate kernel of my remarks is this: I bid you be slow of speech.

to live in accordance with his own nature. But this is turned into a hard task by the general madness of mankind; we push one another into vice.

the good in life does not depend upon life's length, but upon the use we make of it;

Learning virtue means unlearning vice.

because it is characteristic of a weak and diseased mind to fear that which is unfamiliar.

We too have a war to wage, a type of warfare in which there is allowed no rest or furlough.

To be conquered, in the first place, are pleasures, which, as you see, have carried off even the sternest characters.

If a man has once understood how great is the task which he has entered upon, he will see that there must be ...

I have set freedom before my eyes; and I am striving for that reward. And what is freedom, you ask? It means not being a slave to any circumstance, to any constraint, to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on equal terms.

The spirit is weakened by surroundings that are too pleasant, and without a doubt one's place of residence can contribute towards impairing its vigour.

Above all, drive pleasures from your sight.

I say, but men who teach us by their lives, men who tell us what we ought to do and then prove it by practice, who show us what we should avoid, and then are never caught doing that which they have ordered us to avoid.

Death is non-existence, and I know already what that means. What was before me will happen again after me.

If there is any suffering in this state, there must have been such suffering also in the past, before we entered the light of day. As a matter of fact, however, we felt no discomfort then.

We mortals also are lighted and extinguished; the period of suffering comes in between, but on either side there is a deep peace.

we go astray in thinking that death only follows, when in reality it has both preceded us and will in turn follow us.

and the wise man does nothing unwillingly. He escapes necessity, because he wills to do what necessity is about to force upon him.