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“4. There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality. […] What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come. 5. Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.”

—Seneca, Epistles 13.4-5 (tr. Gummere, 1917)