Moral Letters to Lucilius Volume 1

When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.

If we could be satisfied with anything, we should have been satisfied long ago.

Men whose spirit has grown arrogant from the great favor of fortune have this most serious fault—those whom they have injured they also hate.

No man can be sane who searches for what will injure him in place of what is best.

Do not run hither and thither and distract yourself by changing your abode; for such restlessness is the sign of a disordered spirit.

Are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate. [...] Do you ask why such flight does not help you? It is because you flee along with yourself. You must lay aside the burdens of the mind; until you do this, no place will satisfy you.

Why do I not rather seek some real good - one which I could feel, not one which I could display? These things that draw the eyes of men, before which they halt, which they show to one another in wonder, outwardly glitter, but are worthless within.

It is our conscience, not our pride, that has put doorkeepers at our doors.

The highest good is a mind that scorns the happenings of chance, and rejoices only in virtue.

No good thing renders its possessor happy, unless his mind is reconciled to the possibility of loss; nothing, however, is lost with less discomfort than that which, when lost, cannot be missed.

Life, if you know how to use it, is long; but…many, following no fixed aim, shifting and… dissatisfied, are plunged by their fickleness into plans that are ever new; some have no fixed principle by which to direct their course.

We are indeed apt to ascribe certain faults to the place or to the time; but those faults will follow us, no matter how we change our place.

We should conduct ourselves not as if we ought to live for the body, but as if we could not live without it. Our too great love for it makes us restless with fears, burdens us with cares, and exposes us to insults.

No past life has been lived to lend us glory, and that which has existed before us is not ours.

Although the sum and substance of the happy life is unalloyed freedom from care, and though the secret of such freedom is unshaken confidence... men gather together that which causes worry.

What Chance has made yours is not really yours.

Turn to philosophy, therefore, with all your soul, sit at her feet, cherish her; a great distance will then begin to separate you from other men. You will be far ahead of all mortals, and even the gods will not be far ahead of you. Do you ask what will be the difference between yourself and the gods? They will live longer. But, by my faith, it is the sign of a great artist to have confined a full likeness to the limits of a miniature. The wise man's life spreads out to him over as large a surface as does all eternity to a god. There is one point in which the sage has an advantage over the god; for a god is freed from terrors by the bounty of nature, the wise man by his own bounty.

There is no worse penalty for vice than the fact that it is dissatisfied with itself and all its fellows.

¿Preguntas cúal es el fundamento de la sabiduría? No gozarte en cosas vanas.

No he nacido para un sólo rincón; mi patria es todo el mundo visible