Wisdom From Seneca’s Letters — Part 3

This is third part of Seneca’s wisdom as garnered from the book Letters from a Stoic:

• … And harassed by the body’s overwhelming weight, the soul is in captivity unless philosophy comes to its rescue, bidding it breathe more freely in the contemplation of nature, releasing it from earthly into heavenly surroundings. This to the soul means freedom, the ability to wander far and free; it steals away for a while from the prison in which it is confined and has its strength renewed in the world above.
• There are times when even to live is an act of bravery.
• “In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes.” — Posidonius
• But there is really only one liberal study that deserves the name — because it makes a person free — and that is the pursuit of wisdom.
• Misfortune has a way of choosing some unprecedented means or other of impressing its power on those who might be said to have forgotten it.
• An hour, an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires. It would be some relief to our condition and our frailty if all things were as slow in their perishing as they were in their coming into being: but as it is, the growth of things is a tardy process and their undoing is a rapid matter.
• Freedom cannot be won without sacrifice. If you set a high value on her, everything else must be valued at little.
• But nothing will help quite so much as just keeping quiet, talking with other people as little as possible, with yourself as much as possible. For conversation has a kind of charm about it, an insinuating and insidious something that elicits secrets from us just like love or liquor. Nobody will keep the things he hears to himself, and nobody will repeat just what he hears and no more. Neither will anyone who has failed to keep a story to himself keep the name of his informant to himself. Every person without exception has someone to whom he confides everything that is confided to himself. Even supposing he puts some guard on his garrulous tongue and is content with a single pair of ears, he will be the creator of a host of later listeners — such is the way in which what was but a little while before a secret becomes common rumour.
• It is by means of opposites that eternity endures.
• It is in no man’s power to have whatever he wants; but he has it in his power not to wish for what he hasn’t got, and cheerfully make the most of the things that do come his way. And a stomach firmly under control, one that will put up with hard usage, marks a considerable step towards independence.
• Look at the number of things we buy because others have bought them of they’re in most people’s houses. One of the causes of the troubles that beset us is the way our lives are guided by the examples of others; instead of being set to rights by reason we’re seduced by convention. There are things that we shouldn’t wish to imitate if they were done by only a few, but when a lot of people have started doing them we follow along, as though a practice became more respectable.