Letters From a Stoic. By Seneca

Synopsis – A man writes letters to his friends and discusses his thoughts on a number of topics including but not limited to death, wealth, failure, friendship, reputation and philosophy.

Letter 2

• You ask what is the proper limits to a person’s wealth? First, having what is essential, and second, having what is enough

This is a hard one, deep. There are two types of wealth, be settled with what you have.

Letter 3

• Think for a long time whether you should admit a given person to your friendship. But when you have decided to do so, welcome him heart and soul and speak as unreservedly with him as you would with yourself
• Trusting everyone is as much a fault as trusting no one

Treat your friends with all the love and graciousness you can but choose your friends carefully.

Letter 5

• Inwardly everything should be different but our outward face should conform with the crowd
• Let our aim be a way of life not diametrically opposed to, but better than that of the mob.
• Philosophy calls for simple living, not for doing penance and simple way of life need not be a crude one

Don’t go too far in show in how different you are, if fasting and at a dinner then eat, fast another time.

Letter 6

• Personal converse, though, and daily intimacy with someone will be of more benefit to you than any discourse
• What progress have I made? I am beginning to be my own friend. That is progress indeed. Such a person will never be alone, and you may be sure he is a friend of all

Talk with people rather than just write and if you can be a friend to yourself, you will be a friend to everyone

Letter 7

• A single example of extravagance or greed does a lot of harm – an intimate who leads a pampered life gradually makes one soft and flabby; a wealthy neighbour provokes craving in one; a companion with a malicious nature tends to rub off some of his rust even on someone of an innocent and open hearted nature – what then do you imagine the effect on a persons character is when the assault comes from the world at large?
• I am writing this he say not for the eyes of the many, but for yours alone: for each of us is audience enough for the other. Lay these up in your heart, my dear Lucilius, that you may scorn the pleasure that comes from the majority’s approval

The things you see or the people you hang around with will rub off on you and don’t do things for the pleasure of the crowd but rather for your own enjoyment

Letter 8

• Avoid, I cry, whatever is approved of by the mob and things that are the gift of chance.
• If you pray a thing may, and it does come your way, Tis a long way from being your own

What is given to you by fortune is not your own as it can be taken by fortune

Letter 9

• Not, as Epicurus put it in the same letter, for the purpose of having someone to come and sit beside his bed when he is ill or come to his rescue when he is hard up or thrown into chains, but so that on the contrary he may have someone by whose sickbed he himself may sit or whom he may himself release when that person is held prisoner by hostile hands.
• Self-contented as he is, then, he does need friends – and wants as many of them as possible – but not to enable him to lead a happy life; this he will have even without friends. The supreme ideal does not call for any external aids. It is homegrown, wholly self-developed. Once it starts looking outside itself for any part of itself it is on the way to being dominated by fortune

Be a friend so you can be of service and learn to be happy without friends for even they are not guaranteed

Letter 11

• My letter calls for a conclusion. Here’s one for you, one that will serve you in good stead, too, which I’d like you to take to heart. We need to set our affections on some good man and keep him constantly before our eyes, so that we may live as if he were watching us and do everything as if he saw what we were doing.

How would you behave if someone you admired is always watching you?

Letter 12

• It’s not very pleasant, though, you may say, to have death right before one’s eyes. To this I would say, firstly, that death ought to be right there before the eyes of a young man just as much as an old one – the order in which we each receive our summons is not determined by our precedence in the register – and, secondly, that no one is so very old that it would be quite unnatural for him to hope for one more day.
• I have lived; I have completed now the course That fortune long ago allotted me.

Be okay with dying it’s a natural part of our life

Letter 26

• Count your years and you’ll be ashamed to be wanting and working for exactly the same things as you wanted when you were a boy. Of this one thing make sure against your dying day – that your faults die before you do.
• Look around for some enduring good instead. And nothing answers this description except what the spirit discovers for itself within itself.

Do not die with the wants of a boy but rather do want your spirit calls you to do before death.

Letter 28

• As it is, instead of travelling you are rambling and drifting, exchanging one place for another when the thing you are looking for, the good life, is available everywhere.

Live your best life where you are right now.

Letter 38

• Philosophy is good advice, and no one gives advice at the top of his voice. Such harangues, if I may call them that, may need to be resorted to now and then where a person in a state of indecision is needing a push.

Learn to advise with the right tone of voice, softly.

Letter 40

• The upshot, then, of what I have to say is this: I am telling you to be a slow speaking person

This one is personal, is my talking fast a result of my own insecurities?

Letter 41

• There resides within us a divine spirit, which guards us and watches us in the evil and the good we do. As we treat him, so will he treat us.

Respect the divine spirit when it speaks to you listen and ACT

Letter 47

• He’s a slave. But he may have the spirit of a free man. He’s a slave. But is that really to count against him? Show me a man who isn’t a slave; one is a slave to sex, another to money, another to ambition; all are slaves to hope or fear.

Everyone is a slave, do not judge others for their shortcomings

Letter 55

• The person who has run away from the world and his fellow-men, whose exile is due to the unsuccessful outcome of his own desires, who is unable to endure the sight of others more fortunate, who has taken to some place of hiding in his alarm like a timid, inert animal, he is not “living for himself”, but for his belly and his sleep and his passions – in utter degradation, in other words.

Show yourself after failure the same way you would show yourself after success

Letter 56

• You may be sure that it is when they abate and give every appearance of being cured that they are at their most dangerous

The devil will come for you when you are at your strongest

Letter 77

•  Surely you can adopt the spirited attitude of that boy and say, No slave am I! At present, you unhappy creature, slave you are, slave to your fellow-men, slave to circumstance and slave to life (for life itself is slavery if the courage to die be absent).

You can always to end it if slavery is not for you

Letter 78

•  As Posidonius said, “In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes. In the meantime cling tooth and nail to the following rule: not to give in to adversity, never to trust prosperity, and always take full note of fortune’s habit of behaving just as she pleases, treating her as if she were actually going to do everything it is in her power to do”

The world is more open and beautiful to those who take the time to understand it and never forget the role of fortune, positive or negative.

Letter 83

•  For what is to be gained if something is concealed from man when nothing is barred from God?

This speaks to honesty and being genuine, do not lie and deceive.

Letter 94

• For the only safe harbour in this life tossing, troubled sea is to refuse to be bothered about what the future will bring and to stand ready and confident, squaring the breast to take without skulking or flinching whatever fortune hurls at us.

No whinging, moaning, or complaining

Letter 108

• Let us speak and live like that. Let fate find us ready and eager. 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.
• Things tend, in fact, to go wrong; part of the blame lies on the teachers of philosophy, who today teach us how to argue instead of how to live, part on their students, who come to the teachers in the first place with a view to developing not their character but their intellect. The result has been the transformation of philosophy, the study of wisdom, into philology, the study of words.
• “We need to bestir ourselves; life will leave us behind unless we make haste; the days are fleeting by, carried away at a gallop, carrying us with them; we fail to realize the pace at which we are being swept along; here we are making comprehensive plans for the future and generally behaving as if we had all the leisure in the world when there are precipices all around us.”

Focus on developing your character, do hard things that make you better and remember time is slipping by, anything you want to do you must do it now, as soon as possible, make it happen.

Letter 123

• With all such people you should avoid associating. These are the people who pass on vices, transmitting them from one character to another. One used to think that the type of person who spreads tales was as bad as any: but there are persons who spread vices. And association with them does a lot of damage. For even if its success is not immediate, it leaves a seed in the mind, and even after we’ve said goodbye to them, the evil follows us, to rear its head at some time or other in the future.
• There’s only one way to be happy and that’s to make the most of life. Eating, drinking, spending the money that’s been left to you, that’s what I call living – and that’s what I call not forgetting that you’ve got to die someday, too. The days are slipping by, and life is running out on us, never to be restored. Why should we hesitate? What’s the point of being wise? Our years won’t always allow us a life of pleasure, and in the meantime while they’re capable of it and clamouring for it, what’s the point of thrusting austerity on them? Steal a march on death by disposing here and now of whatever he is going to take away. Look at you – no mistress, no boy to make your mistress jealous. Every day you go out sober. You eat as if you had to submit a daily account book to your father for approval. That’s not living – that’s merely being a part of the life enjoyed by other people. And what madness it is to deny yourself everything and so build up a fortune for your heir, a policy which has the effect of actually turning a friend into an enemy, through the very amount that you’re going to leave him, for the more he’s going to get the more gleeful he’s going to be at your death.

Live your life to the fullest, tomorrow isn’t promised so enjoy it today and give it everything you have.

Final Thoughts

As hard as it is to rise up to Senca’s ideals, you can imagine how much better we would live if we did. Doing our best, not associating with bad people, treating the imposters of glory and failure just the same and listening to our spirit. The quotes from this book should serve as an inspiration to get better each day.