Moral Letters to Lucilius

​Your complaint is that less carefully composed letters are sent to you by me. For who speaks with meticulous care, unless he wants to speak in an affected manner? Such as my conversation would be if we were sitting or walking together, unlabored and easy, such I wish my letters to be, which have nothing fetched from afar nor fictitious.

​If it could be done, I should prefer to show what I feel rather than to speak it. Even if I were debating, I would neither stamp my foot, nor wave my hand, nor raise my voice, but I would have left those things to the orators, content to have conveyed my thoughts to you, which I would have neither adorned nor degraded.

​This one thing indeed I should wish to prove to you: that I feel all those things that I say, and not only feel them, but love them. People kiss a mistress in one way, and their children in another; yet in this latter embrace also, so holy and moderate, affection is sufficiently apparent. I do not, by Hercules, want what is said about such great matters to be starved and dry; for philosophy does not renounce talent. Yet much labor ought not to be spent on words.

​Let this be the sum of our purpose: let us speak what we feel, let us feel what we speak; let our speech harmonize with our life. He has fulfilled his promise who, both when you see him and when you hear him, is the same.

​We shall see what sort of man he is, how great he is; let him be one. Let our words not delight, but benefit. If, however, eloquence can fall to the lot of one who is not anxious for it, if it is either ready at hand or costs little, let it be present and accompany the most beautiful subjects. Let it be such that it shows the matter rather than itself. Other arts belong entirely to talent; here, the business of the soul is being transacted.

​A sick man does not look for an eloquent physician, but if it so happens that the very same man who can cure can also discuss elegantly what needs to be done, he will take it in good part. Yet there will be no reason for him to congratulate himself because he has run into a physician who is also eloquent. For this is of such a kind as if a skilled pilot were also handsome.

​Why do you tickle my ears? Why do you entertain me? Something else is at stake; I am to be cauterized, incised, kept on a strict diet. For these things you have been called in. You have to cure an old, severe, public disease. You have as much business as a physician has in a plague. Are you busy about words? Rejoice long ago if you are equal to the facts. When will you learn so many things? When will you fix what you have learned in yourself so that they cannot slip away? When will you try them in practice? For it is not enough, as in other things, to have committed them to memory; they must be tested in action. He is not happy who knows those things, but he who does them.” “What then?

​Are there no steps below him? Is there a precipice immediately down from wisdom?” No, as I think. For he who makes progress is indeed in the number of the foolish, yet he is separated from them by a great interval. Among those making progress themselves there are also great distinctions. They are divided into three classes, as it pleases some: the first are those who do not yet possess wisdom, but have already taken their stand in its neighborhood.

​Yet even what is near is still outside. Who are these, you ask? Those who have already laid aside all passions and vices, and have learned what had to be mastered, but their confidence is still untested. They do not yet have their good in use, yet they can no longer fall back into those things which they have fled. They are already in a place from which there is no backward slip, but this is not yet clear to them concerning themselves; as I remember writing in a certain letter, “they do not know that they know.” It has already fallen to their lot to enjoy their good, but not yet to trust it.