Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium (Classics S.)

‘No man’s good by accident. Virtue has to be learnt. Pleasure is a poor and petty thing. No value should be set on it: it’s something we share with dumb animals – the minutest, most insignificant creatures scutter after it. Glory’s an empty, changeable thing, as fickle as the weather. Poverty’s no evil to anyone unless he kicks against it. Death is

One used to think that the type of person who spreads tales was as bad as any: but there are persons who spread vices. And association with them does a lot of damage. For even if its success is not immediate, it leaves a seed in the mind, and even after we’ve said goodbye to them, the evil follows us, to rear its head at some time or other in the f

Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are.

Devotion to what is right is simple, devotion to what is wrong is complex and admits of infinite variations.

Having started to make a practice of desiring everything contrary to nature’s habit, they finally end up by breaking off relations with her altogether.

Show me a man who isn’t a slave; one is a slave to sex, another to money, another to ambition; all are slaves to hope or fear. I could show you a man who has been a Consul who is a slave to his ‘little old woman’, a millionaire who is the slave of a little girl in domestic service. I could show you some highly aristocratic young men who are utter s

To want to know more than is sufficient is a form of intemperance.

Natural desires are limited; those which spring from false opinions have nowhere to stop, for falsity has no point of termination. When a person is following a track, there is an eventual end to it somewhere, but with wandering at large there is no limit. So give up pointless, empty journeys, and whenever you want to know whether the desire aroused

When one has lost a friend one’s eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Tears, yes, there should be, but not lamentation.