Source Selections
Take me to another random selection
“15 Everyone you see is in pursuit of joy, but they do not know where great and lasting joy is to be had. One tries to get it from dinner parties and self-indulgence; another from elections and crowds of supporters; another from his girlfriend; another from pointless display of education and literary studies that do not heal what is amiss. All of them are deceived by specious and short-lived enticements, like drunkenness, that pays for a single hour’s cheery insanity with a long-lasting hangover, or like the applause and acclamation of a large following, that costs you great anxiety both to get and to retain.
16 So ponder this: the result of wisdom is steadiness of joy. The wise mind is like the superlunary heaven: eternally serene. Thus you have reason to desire wisdom if wisdom is always accompanied by joy. But this joy has only one source: a consciousness of the virtues. A person is not capable of joy unless he is brave, unless he is just, unless he is temperate.
17 You say, ‘What do you mean? Don’t foolish people rejoice?’ No more than lions rejoice when they have caught their prey. When people have worn themselves out with wine and lust; when their vices outlast the night; when the pleasures they have consumed beyond the narrow limits of the body begin to suppurate; then in their misery they speak aloud that familiar line of Virgil:
For you know how we spent that night, our last,
amid deceiving joys.
18 Indulging themselves, they spend every night amid deceiving joys, as if it were indeed their last.
But the joy that attends on the gods and those who imitate the gods has no intermission and no end. It would have an end if its source were from elsewhere; but it is not for anyone else to bestow, and for that reason it is not for anyone else to decide whether they shall have it. What fortune did not grant, fortune does not take away.”
—Seneca, Letters 59.15-16 (tr. Graver & Long, 2015)