Letters from a Stoic

by Seneca

our power, we shall possess a great deal: but we once possessed the world.

But however wonderful and guileless the life they led, they were not wise men; this is a title that has come to be reserved for the highest of all achievements. All the same, I should be the last to deny that they were men of exalted spirit, only one step removed, so to speak, from the gods.

For nature does not give a man virtue: the process of becoming a good man is an art.

And there is a world of difference between, on the one hand, choosing not to do what is wrong and, on the other, not knowing how to do it in the first place.

What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster. The fact that it was unforeseen has never failed to intensify a person’s grief. This is a reason for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise.

We should project our thoughts ahead of us at every turn and have in mind every possible eventuality instead of only the usual course of events.

No moment is exempt: in the midst of pleasures there are found the springs of suffering. In the middle of peace war rears its head, and the bulwarks of one’s security are transformed into sources of alarm, friend turning foe and ally turning enemy.

And it is not only the works of human hands that waste away, nor only structures raised by human skill and industry that the passing days demolish. Mountain massifs crumble away, whole regions have subsided, the waves have covered landmarks once far out of sight of the sea. The immense force of volcanic fires that once made the mountain-tops glow has eaten them away and reduced to lowly stature what once were soaring peaks, reassuring beacons to the mariner. The works of nature herself suffer.

The great lawgiver draws no distinctions between us according to our birth or the celebrity of our names, save only while we exist. On the reaching of mortality’s end he declares, ‘Away with snobbery; all that the earth carries shall forthwith be subject to one law without discrimination.’ When it comes to all we’re required to go through, we’re equals. No one is more vulnerable than the next man, and no one can be more sure of his surviving to the morrow.

Christianity?????

Well, imagine that nature is saying to you, “Those things you grumble about are the same for everyone. I can give no one anything easier. But anyone who likes may make them easier for himself.’ How? By viewing them with equanimity.

old (assuming that you are vouchsafed a relatively long stay among men) and be ill, and suffer loss, and finally perish. But you needn’t believe the chatter of the people around you: there’s nothing in all this that’s evil, insupportable or even hard. Those people are afraid of these things by a kind of general consent.

And no one has power over us when death is within our own power.

The notion occurs to me that inside this old frame there exists a young man as well and one is always less severe on a young man.

The good man should go on living as long as he ought to, not just as long as he likes.

The man who does not value his wife or a friend highly enough to stay on a little longer in life, who persists in dying in spite of them, is a thoroughly self-indulgent character.

The story is told that someone complained to Socrates that travelling abroad had never done him any good and received the reply: ‘What else can you expect, seeing that you always take yourself along with you when you go abroad?’

What a blessing it would be for some people if they could only lose themselves !

What good does it do you to go overseas, to move from city to city? If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.

However much you possess there’s someone else who has more, and you’ll be fancying yourself to be short of things you need to the exact extent to which you lag behind him.

Death you’ll think of as the worst of all bad things, though in fact there’s nothing bad about it at all except the thing which comes before it – the fear of it. You’ll be scared stiff by illusory as well as genuine dangers, haunted by imaginary alarms. What good will it do you to

hardest of all blows to bear, while all the time this will be as silly as crying because the leaves fall from the beautiful trees that add to the charm of your home. Preserve a sense of proportion in your attitude to everything that pleases you, and make the most of them while they are at their best. At one moment chance will carry off one of them, at another moment another; but the falling of the leaves is not difficult to bear, since they grow again, and it is no more hard to bear the loss of those whom you love and regard as brightening your existence; for even if they do not grow again they are replaced ‘But their successors will never be quite the same’ No, and neither will you. Every day, every hour sees a change in you, although the ravages of time are easier to see in others; in your own case they are far less obvious, because to you they do not show. While other people are snatched away from us, we are being filched away surreptitiously from ourselves.

never hope without an element of despair, never despair without an element of hope.

good has travel of itself ever been able to do anyone? It has never acted as a check on pleasure or a restraining influence on desires; it has never controlled the temper of an angry man or quelled the reckless impulses of a lover; never in fact has it rid the personality of a fault.

The instability, moreover, of a mind which is seriously unwell, is aggravated by it, the motion itself increasing the fitfulness and restlessness. This explains why people, after setting out for a place with the greatest of enthusiasm, are often more enthusiastic about getting away from it; like migrant birds, they fly on, away even quicker than they came.

Travel will give you a knowledge of other countries, it will show you mountains whose outlines are quite new to you, stretches of unfamiliar plains, valleys watered by perennial streams; it will allow you to observe the unique features of this or that river, the way in which, for example, the Nile rises in summer flood, or the Tigris vanishes from sight and at the completion of its journey through hidden subterranean regions is restored to view with its volume undiminished, or the way the Meander, theme of every poet’s early training exercises, winds about, loop after loop, and again and again is carried close to its own bed and then once more diverted into a different course before it can flow into its own stream. But travel won’t make a better or saner man of you.

we must spend time in study and in the writings of wise men, to learn the truths that have emerged from their researches, and carry on the search ourselves for the answers that have not yet been discovered. This is the way to liberate the spirit t...

All this hurrying from place to place won’t bring you any relief, for you’re travelling in the company of your own emotions, followed by your troubles all the way.

Travelling doesn’t make a man a doctor or a public speaker: there isn’t a single art which is acquired merely by being in one place rather wan another.

Take my word for it, the trip doesn’t exist that can set you beyond the reach of cravings, fits of temper, or fears. If it did, the human race would be off there in a body. So long as you carry the sources of your troubles about with you, those troubles will continue to harass and plague you wherever you wander on land or on sea.

Does it surprise you that running away doesn’t do you any good? The things you’re running away fr...

If you want to enjoy your travel, you must make your travelling companion a healthy one.

just to entertain your listeners to a clever display of language, but to steel your spirit and brace it against whatever threatens. For the only safe harbour in this life’s tossing, troubled sea is to refuse to be bothered about what the future will bring and to stand ready and confident, squaring the breast to take without skulking or flinching whatever fortune hurls at us.

Shapes frightening to the sight, Hardship and Death.

Our Virgil perfectly rightly says that they are frightening, not in reality, but ‘to the sight’, in other words that they seem so but in fact are not.

It’s not because they’re hard that we lose confidence; they’re hard because we lack the confidence.

For there is Cato denouncing each of them, trying to disarm the pair of them. And the way he casts his vote between them is: ‘If Caesar wins, I kill myself; if Pompey, I go into exile’ What had a man to fear who, win or lose, had dictated to himself such a choice of fates as might have been decreed him by an utterly exasperated enemy? And that is how he came to die, carrying out his own self-sentence.

We, then, can show as spirited an attitude to just the same things if we will only choose to slip the yoke from our necks. But first we have to reject the life of pleasures; they make us soft and womanish;

Gold and silver and everything else that clutters our prosperous homes should be discarded. Freedom cannot be won without sacrifice. If you set a high value on her, everything else must be valued at little.

there isn’t a man who hasn’t power enough to do you injury.

People who know no self-restraint lead stormy and disordered lives, passing their time in a state of fear commensurate with the injuries they do to others, never able to relax.

A guilty person sometimes has the luck to escape detection, but never to feel sure of it.

Things will get thrown at you and things will hit you. Life’s no soft affair. It’s a long road you’ve started on: you can’t but expect to have slips and knocks and falls, and get tired, and openly wish – a lie – for death.

Wanting to die? Let the personality be made ready to face everything; let it be made to realize that it has come to terrain on which thunder and lightning play, terrain on which Grief and vengeful Care have set their couch, And pallid Sickness dwells, and drear Old Age.

This is the company in which you must live out your days. Escape them you cannot, scorn them you can. And scorn them you will if by constant reflection you have anticipated future happenings. Everyone faces up more bravely to a thing for which he has long prepared himself, sufferings, even; being withstood if they have been trained for in advance.

Those who are unprepared, on the other hand, are panic-stricken by the most insignificant happenings. We must see to it that nothing takes us by surprise.

And since it is invariably unfamiliarity that makes a thing more formidable than it really is, this habit of continual reflection will ensure that no form ...

mention anything you like, it has happened to plenty of people. A vast variety of missiles are launched with us as their target. Some

Lead me, Master of the soaring vault Of Heaven, lead me, Father, where you will. I stand here prompt and eager to obey. And ev’n suppose I were unwilling, still I should attend you and know suffering, Dishonourably and grumbling, when I might Have done so and been good as, well. For Fate The willing leads, the unwilling drags along.

Let us speak and live like that. Let fate find us ready and eager. Here is your noble spirit – the one which has put itself in the hands of fate;

A person going out into the sun, whether or not this is what he is going out for, will acquire a tan.