s and
pains, those most untrustworthy and passionate of masters. We must,
therefore, escape from them into freedom. This nothing will bestow
upon us save contempt of Fortune; but if we attain to this, then there
will dawn upon us those invaluable blessings, the repose of a mind
that is at rest in a safe haven, its lofty imaginings, its great and
steady delight at casting out errors and learning to know the truth,
its courtesy and its cheerfulness, in all of which we shall take
delight, not regarding them as good things, but as proceeding from the
proper good of man....

Why do you put together two things which are unlike and even
incompatible one with another? virtue is a lofty quality, sublime,
royal, unconquerable, untiring: pleasure is low, slavish, weakly,
perishable; its haunts and homes are the brothel and the tavern. You
will meet virtue in the temple, the market-place, the senate-house,
manning the walls, covered with dust, sunburnt, horny-handed: you will
find pleasure skulking out of sight, seeking for shady nooks at the
public baths, hot chambers, and places which dread the visits of the
aedile, soft, effeminate, reeking of wine and perfumes, pale or
perhaps painted and made up with cosmetics. The highest good is
immortal: it knows no ending, and does not admit of either satiety or
regret: for a right-thinking mind never alters or becomes hateful to
itself, nor do the best things ever undergo any change: but pleasure
dies at the very moment when it charms us most: it has no great scope,
and therefore it soon cloys and wearies us, and fades away as soon as
its first impulse is over: indeed, we can not depend upon anything
whose nature is to change. Consequently, it is not even possible that
there should be any solid substance in that which comes and goes so
swiftly and which perishes by the very exercise of its own functions,
for it arrives at a point at which it ceases to be, and even while it
is beginning always keeps its end in view....

A man should be unbiassed and not to be conquered by external things:
he ought to admire himself alone, to feel confidence in his own
spirit, and so to order his life as to be ready alike for good or bad
fortune. Let not his confidence be without knowledge, nor his
knowledge without stedfastness: let him always abide by what he has
once determined, and let there be no erasure in his doctrine. It will
be understood, even tho I append it not, that such a man will be
tranqu