Letters From a Stoic

Nature just wields her power and uses the particular weakness to make even the strongest conscious of her.

But while he does not hanker after what he has lost, he does prefer not to lose them.

In case you imagine that we Stoics are the only people who produce noble sayings, let me tell you something – see that you put this down to my credit, even though I have already settled my account with you for today – Epicurus himself, who has nothing good to say for Stilbo, has uttered a statement quite like this one of Stilbo’s. ‘Any man,’ he say

And this is what we mean when we say the wise man is self-content; he is so in the sense that he is able to do without friends, not that he desires to do without them.

It has become his duty to be kind and forgiving towards others, indeed to ‘live for the other person’.33 In his way of living he should avoid being ostentatiously different from those he tries to win from moral ignorance.