Letters from a Stoic by Seneca

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Genre: Philosophy

Rating: 5/5

Date Read: 24/03/2023

Goodreads Profile: Abhishek Rao

If you wish to be loved, love. - Seneca

Seneca, the renowned Stoic philosopher of ancient Rome, penned a collection of letters addressed to his friend Lucilius from about 63 AD - 65 AD. In "Letters from a Stoic," Seneca imparts timeless wisdom on living a virtuous life, embracing hardships, and cultivating inner tranquillity. Through these letters, he offers profound insights that continue to resonate with readers seeking guidance on navigating life's challenges with wisdom and resilience.

Introduction as in the Book:

We shall arrive at the true end of man, happiness, through having attained the only good thing in life, the ideal or goal called arete in Greek and in Latin virtus – for which the English word ‘virtue’ is so unsatisfactory a translation. This, the summum bonum or ‘supreme ideal’, is usually summarized in ancient philosophy as a combination of four qualities: wisdom (or moral insight), courage, self-control and justice (or upright dealing).

Letter II:

Nothing, to my way of thinking, is better proof of a well-ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.
Reading two books is like tasting two different dishes at the same time, with varying tastes, you can neither enjoy any of the dishes nor does it help you nutritionally.
If you need a break from the book you are currently reading then pick up an old book that you have already read.
A plant which is frequently moved never grows strong.
To be everywhere is to be nowhere.
Each day, too, acquire something which will help you to face poverty, death, and other ills as well.
You ask what is the proper limit to a person’s wealth? First, having what is essential, and second, having what is enough.
It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the one who hankers after more.

Letter III:

After friendship is formed you must trust, but before that, you must judge.
People who never relax and people who are invariably in a relaxed state merit your disapproval.
But if you are looking at anyone as a friend when you do not trust him as you trust yourself, you are making a grave mistake, and have failed to grasp sufficiently the full force of true friendship.
Regard him as loyal, and you will make him loyal. Some men’s fear of being deceived has taught people to deceive them; by their suspiciousness, they give them the right to do the wrong thing by them.

Letter V:

I view with pleasure and approval the way you keep on at your studies and sacrifice everything to your single-minded efforts to make yourself every day a better man.
One’s life should be a compromise between ideal and popular morality.
Let our aim be a way of life not opposed to, but better than that of the mob.
Limiting one’s desires helps to cure one of fear. ‘Cease to hope,’ he says, ‘and you will cease to fear.’
Anyone entering our homes should admire us rather than our furnishings.
Wild animals run from the dangers they see, and once they have escaped, they worry no more. We however are tormented alike by what is past and what is to come. A number of our blessings do us harm, for memory brings back the agony of fear while foresight brings it on prematurely. No one confines their unhappiness to the present.

Letter VI:

There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with.
The fact that it perceives the failings it was unaware of in itself before, is evidence of a change for the better in one’s character.
‘What progress have I made? I am beginning to be my friend.’ That is progress indeed. Such a person will never be alone, and you may be sure he is a friend of all.

Letter VII:

What then do you imagine the effect on a person’s character is when the assault comes from the world at large? You must inevitably either hate or imitate the world. But the right thing is to shun both courses: you should neither become like the bad because they are many, nor be an enemy of the many because they are unlike you. Retire into yourself as much as you can. Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those whom you are capable of improving.
‘To me,’ says Democritus, ‘a single man is a crowd, and a crowd is a single man.’
The many speak highly of you, but have you any grounds for satisfaction with yourself if you are the kind of person the many understand? Your merits should not be outward facing.

Letter VIII:

Indulge the body just so far as suffices for good health.
What you have to understand is that thatch makes a person just as good a roof as gold does.

Letter IX:

If you wish to be loved, love.
Great pleasure is to be found not only in keeping up an old and established friendship but also in beginning and building a new one.
‘Any man,’ he says, ‘who does not think that what he has is more than ample, is an unhappy man, even if he is the master of the whole world.’
But while he does not hanker after what he has lost, he does prefer not to lose them.
What matters is how he feels, and not how he feels on one particular day but how he feels at all times.

Letter XI:

Happy the man who improves other people not merely when he is in their presence but even when he is in their thoughts!
Be always pointing him out to yourself either as your guardian or as your model. There is a need, in my view, for someone as a standard against which our characters can measure themselves.

Letter XV:

We have good reason to say: ‘I trust this finds you in pursuit of wisdom.’
So continually remind yourself, of the many things you have achieved. When you look at all the people out in front of you, think of all the ones behind you.
Why be concerned about others, come to that, when you’ve outdone yourself?

Letter XVI:

It is clear to you, that no one can lead a happy life, or even one that is bearable, without the pursuit of wisdom, and that the perfection of wisdom is what makes a happy life.
Nature’s wants are small, while those of opinions are limitless.
‘If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to people’s opinions, you will never be rich.’

Letter XVIII:

A good character is the only guarantee of everlasting, carefree happiness.
Remaining dry and sober takes a good deal more strength of will when everyone about one is puking drunk; it takes a more developed sense of fitness, on the other hand, not to make of oneself a person apart, to be neither indistinguishable from those about one nor conspicuous by one’s difference, to do the same things but not in quite the same manner. A holiday can be celebrated without extravagant festivity.
Set aside now and then several days during which you will be content with the plainest of food, and very little of it, and with rough, coarse clothing, and will ask yourself, ‘Is this what one used to dread?’
Start following these men’s practices and appoint certain days on which to give up everything and make yourself at home with next to nothing. Start cultivating a relationship with poverty.

Letter XXVII:

But something that can never be learnt too thoroughly can never be said too often. With some people you only need to point to a remedy; others need to have it rammed into them.

Letter XXVIII:

‘A consciousness of wrongdoing is the first step to salvation.’
‘I wasn’t born for one particular corner: the whole world’s my home country.’

Letter XXXIII:

This is why I look at people like this as a spiritless lot – the people who are forever acting as interpreters and never as creators, always lurking in someone else’s shadow. They never venture to do for themselves the things they have spent such a long time learning.

Letter XL:

A philosopher, whose delivery – like his life – should be well-ordered; nothing can be well-regulated if it is done in a breakneck hurry.
Nonetheless what is waited for does sink in more readily than what goes flying past;
Besides, how can a thing possibly govern others when it cannot be governed itself?
Be a slow-speaking person.

Letter XLI:

No one should feel pride in anything that is not his own.
Man’s ideal state is realized when he has fulfilled the purpose for which he was born. And what is it that reason demands of him? Something very easy – that he lives by his nature.

Letter XLVIII:

No one can lead a happy life if he thinks only of himself and turns everything to his purposes.

Letter LIII:

The worse a person is, the less he feels it. A person sleeping lightly perceives impressions in his dreams and is sometimes, even, aware during sleep that he is asleep, whereas a heavy slumber blots out even dreams and plunges the mind too deep for consciousness of self.

Letter LIV:

I ask you, wouldn’t you say that anyone who took the view that a lamp was worse off when it was put out than it was before it was an utter idiot? We, too, are lit and put out. We suffer somewhat in the intervening period, but at either end of it, there is a deep tranquillity. For, unless I’m mistaken, we are wrong, in holding that death follows after, when in fact it precedes as well as succeeds. Death is all that was before us. What does it matter, after all, whether you cease to be or never begin when the result of either is that you do not exist?

Letter LV:

The man, though, whom you should admire and imitate is the one who finds it a joy to live and despite that is not reluctant to die. For, where’s the virtue in going out when you’re being thrown out?

Letter LVI:

Voices, I think, are more inclined to distract one than general noise; noise merely fills one’s ears, battering away at them while voices catch one’s attention.
The fact that the body is lying down is no reason for supposing that the mind is at peace. Rest is sometimes far from restful.

Letter LXXVII:

There’s no difference between the one and the other – you didn’t exist and you won’t exist – you’ve no concern with either period.

Letter LXXVIII:

There are times when even to live is an act of bravery.
Comforting Thoughts (provided they are not of a discreditable kind). Contribute to a person's cure; anything which raises his spirits benefits him physically as well.
My advice to you – and not only in the present illness but in your whole life as well – is this: refuse to let the thought of death bother you: nothing is grim when we have escaped that fear.
Nobody can be in acute pain and feel it for long. Nature in her unlimited kindness to us has so arranged things as to make pain either bearable or brief.
A man is as unhappy as he has convinced himself he is.
An illness that’s swift and short will have one of two results: either oneself or it will be snuffed out. And what difference does it make whether I or it disappears? Either way, there’s an end to the pain.
For a life spent viewing all the variety, the majesty, the sublimity in things around us can never succumb to ennui: the feeling that one is tired of being, of existing, is usually the result of idle and inactive leisure.

LXXXIII:

And we should, indeed, live as if we were in public view, and think, too, as if someone could peer into the inmost recesses of our hearts – which someone can!
Tell them of all the things men do that they would blush at sober, and that drunkenness is nothing but a state of self-induced insanity.

Letter LXXXVIII:

Well, I have no respect for any study whatsoever if its end is the making of money.
What’s the use of overcoming opponent after opponent in the wrestling or boxing rings if you can be overcome by your temper?

Letter XC:

It is incredible, how easily even great men can be carried away from the truth by the sheer pleasure of holding forth on a subject.

Letter CIV:

The story is told that someone complained to Socrates that travelling abroad had never done him any good and received the reply: ‘What else can you expect, seeing that you always take yourself along with you when you go abroad?’ What a blessing it would be for some people if they could only lose themselves!
It’s not because they’re hard that we lose confidence; they’re hard because we lack confidence.
But first, we have to reject the life of pleasures; they make us soft; they are insistent in their demands, and what is more, require us to make insistent demands on fortune.

Letter CVII:

Here is your noble spirit – the one which has put itself in the hands of fate; on the other side we have the puny degenerate spirit which struggles, and which sees nothing right in the way the universe is ordered, and would rather reform the gods than reform itself.

Letter CVIII:

A person going out into the sun, whether or not this is what he is going out for, will acquire a tan.
People prone to every fault they denounce are walking advertisements of the uselessness of their training.

Letter CXXII:

More active and commendable still is the person who is waiting for the daylight and intercepts the first rays of the sun; shame on him who lies in bed dozing when the sun is high in the sky, whose waking hours commence in the middle of the day – and even this time, for a lot of people, is the equivalent of the small hours.
Can you imagine that these people know how one ought to live when they do not know when one ought to live?

Letter CXXIII:

We are attracted by wealth, pleasures, good looks, political advancement and various other welcoming and enticing prospects: we are repelled by exertion, death, pain, disgrace and limited means. It follows that we need to train ourselves not to crave the former and not to be afraid of the latter.
Philosophy has no business supplying vice with excuses; a sick man who is encouraged to live recklessly by his doctor has no hope of getting well.

Book Link: Letters from a Stoic

Abhishek MagRao

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