Letters from a Stoic

Letters from a Stoic - Seneca

you should not copy the bad simply because they are many, nor should you hate the many because they are unlike you. Withdraw into yourself, as far as you can. Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve. The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach. — 2025-08-07

I never spend a day in idleness; I appropriate even a part of the night for study. I do not allow time for sleep but yield to it when I must, and when my eyes are wearied with waking and ready to fall shut, I keep them at their task. — 2025-08-07

understand that a man is sheltered just as well by a thatch as by a roof of gold. — 2025-08-07

If you would enjoy real freedom, you must be the slave of Philosophy. — 2025-08-07

What Chance has made yours is not really yours. — 2025-08-07

The good that could be given, can be removed. — 2025-08-07

He who begins to be your friend because it pays will also cease because it pays. — 2025-08-07

Unblest is he who thinks himself unblest. — 2025-08-07

Folly is ever troubled with weariness of itself. — 2025-08-07

Live among men as if God beheld you; speak with God as if men were listening — 2025-08-07

For we must indeed have someone according to whom we may regulate our characters; you can never straighten that which is crooked unless you use a ruler. — 2025-08-08

What has the future in store for me, if stones of my own age are already crumbling? — 2025-08-08

Death, however, should be looked in the face by young and old alike. We are not summoned according to our rating on the censor’s list. — 2025-08-08

It is wrong to live under constraint; but no man is constrained to live under constraint. — 2025-08-08

For manliness gains much strength by being challenged; — 2025-08-09

There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality. — 2025-08-09

The mind at times fashions for itself false shapes of evil when there are no signs that point to any evil; it twists into the worst construction some word of doubtful meaning; or it fancies some personal grudge to be more serious than it really is, considering not how angry the enemy is, but to what lengths he may go if he is angry. — 2025-08-09

But life is not worth living, and there is no limit to our sorrows, if we indulge our fears to the greatest possible extent; — 2025-08-09