Book: Moral letters to Lucilius. Page 2

One day is equal to every other.

Every day is a step in life, our entire age is divided into parts and consists of circles, smaller and larger, covering smaller ones.

Become a slave to philosophy in order to achieve true freedom.

He who seems to be a bum is busy with the most important matters, both divine and human together.

I say this for you, not for the crowd: after all, each of us for the other is a packed theater.

For me, one person is like a whole nation, and a nation is like one person.

Meanwhile, both one and the other must be avoided: one cannot become like the evil because there are many of them, one cannot hate many because one does not become like them.

What is accidentally inherited cannot be considered your own.

We are mad not only one by one, but entire nations. Murders and individual murderers we have curbed; and what about wars, that the extermination of entire tribes is a glorified atrocity? Neither greed nor cruelty knows the measure. Solo and surreptitious murders are less dangerous and monstrous; but atrocities are being done and now by decree of the Senate and the people, forbidden to private persons is ordered on behalf of the state. For one and the same crime, they pay with their heads if it is completely secret, and if they wear soldier's cloaks, they receive praise.

Medicine was once reduced to the knowledge of a few herbs that stopped bleeding, healed wounds, and then gradually it came to the present variety. And it is not surprising that he had less to do when people were still strong and strong in body, and food was light and not spoiled by the art of receiving pleasure. Only later did they need food that did not satisfy, but incite hunger, and hundreds of seasonings were invented to inflame gluttony, and what was food for the hungry became a burden for the fifth.

Where the enemy can be expected from all sides, the army marches in a square formation, ready for battle. In the same way, he says, the sage should act: he must deploy the system of his virtues in all directions, so that the defense is ready, no matter where the danger arises, and the guards would obey every signal of the chief without the slightest fuss.

You're wrong, Lucily if you think that only our age is guilty of such vices as a passion for luxury, neglect of good manners and all the rest, which each accuses the century. It is the properties of people, not of times: none age of guilt not free.

One each derives something appropriate to his class. On the same meadow the ox is looking for just the grass, the dog the hare, the stork a lizard.

God I don't obey and agree with him and follow him not out of necessity, but from the heart.