Sublime

This criticism misses the point. Even before Marcus’s time, Seneca was well aware that there was a lot of borrowing and overlap among the philosophers. That’s because real philosophers weren’t concerned with authorship, only what worked. More important, they believed that what was said mattered less than what was done.

They are questions about how to treat other people fairly, what kind of greatness to pursue in life, what it means to love and be loved, how we should face death, how society should be organized, who our real friends are, how to raise our children, what the demands of justice are, and quite generally, what to do with our lives.

If philosophers can treat the life of the universe abstractly, they must not complain of an abstract treatment of the life of philosophy itself.

We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching, and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application – not far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech – and learn them so well that words become works. No one to my mind lets humanity down quite so much as those who st

logicality