Letters on Ethics: To Lucilius (The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca)

As if birth order determined our fate! 15 So let us remember mortality, in ourselves as well as our loved ones. I ought to have said, back then, “My dear Serenus is younger than I, but what difference does that make? He ought to die after me, but he could die before.” Because I did not do this, fortune struck me suddenly and unprepared. Now I keep

As for us, we may be forgiven our tears, if there are not too many, and if we do regain control. Having lost a friend, you should not be dry-eyed, but neither should you drown in weeping; you should cry, but not wail.

For when I had friends, I had them as one who would lose them; now that I have lost them, I am as one who still has them.

let us arrange our minds in such a way that whatever circumstances require is what we want—and especially that we think about our own end without sadness. 4 We should prepare for death even before we prepare for life. Our life is well enough equipped. Yet we are greedy for life’s equipment. We think we are missing something, and we always will thin

nature given us such an insatiable maw that although the bodies we are given are of modest size, we yet surpass the largest, most ravenous eaters of the animal world? That is not the case, for how small are our natural requirements! It takes only a little to satisfy nature’s demands. It is not bodily hunger that runs up the bill but ambition.

there are some we should count not even as animate creatures but as corpses. A person is alive when he is of use to many; he is alive when he is of use to himself. Slackers who hide out at home might as well be in the tomb. Go ahead and write it in marble above their door:

They are full of analogies, which to my mind are necessary, not for the reason poets use them, but to provide support for our weakness and to make the subject real to both speaker and hearer.

I find imagery—and if anyone tells us not to use imagery, deeming it allowable only for poets, I think he must not have read even one of our older writers. For them, stylistic decorum was not yet the constant aim: they expressed themselves simply and in such a way as to get their point across.

you have your words under control. You are not carried away by your own eloquence; you don’t let it go on longer than you intended. 5 Many people are drawn by the allure of some pleasing phrase into writing on some topic other than what they had set themselves. That doesn’t happen to you: everything you write is concise and suitable to the subject.