Seneca - Moral Letters - 88: On Liberal and Vocational Studies |
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This is my own recording of a public domain text. It is not copied and I retain the copyright.
The Moral Letter to Lucilius are a collection of 124 letters which were written by Seneca the Younger at the end of his life, during his retirement, and written after he had worked for the Emperor Nero for fifteen years. (These Moral Letters are the same letters which Tim Ferriss promotes in the Tao of Seneca) Support me here: All Links: https://linktr.ee/VoxStoica PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/RobinHomer Amazon Referral: https://geni.us/SupportMeSenecaLetters Translated by Richard Mott Gummere: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/ Notes: “there is only one really liberal study, – that which gives a man his liberty.” “Show me rather, by the example of Ulysses, how I am to love my country, my wife, my father, and how, even after suffering shipwreck, I am to sail toward these ends, honourable as they are.” “You know what a straight line is; but how does it benefit you if you do not know what is straight in this life of ours?” “For just as I know that all things can happen, so I know, too, that they will not happen in every case. I am ready for favourable events in every case, but I am prepared for evil.” *emetic: a medicine or other substance which causes vomiting “For what good does it do us to guide a horse and control his speed with the curb, and then find that our own passions, utterly uncurbed, bolt with us? Or to beat many opponents in wrestling or boxing, and then to find that we ourselves are beaten by anger?” “Why, then, do we educate our children in the liberal studies?” it is not because they can bestow virtue, but because they prepare the soul for the reception of virtue “This desire to know more than is sufficient is a sort of intemperance. Why? Because this unseemly pursuit of the liberal arts makes men troublesome, wordy, tactless, self-satisfied bores, who fail to learn the essentials just because they have learned the non-essentials.” “It is at the cost of a vast outlay of time and of vast discomfort to the ears of others that we win such praise as this: ‘What a learned man you are!’ Let us be content with this recommendation, less citified though it be: ‘What a good man you are!’ “…think how much superfluous and unpractical matter the philosophers contain! Of their own accord they also have descended to establishing nice divisions of syllables, to determining the true meaning of conjunctions and prepositions; they have been envious of the scholars, envious of the mathematicians. They have taken over into their own art all the superfluities of these other arts; the result is that they know more about careful speaking than about careful living.” #stoicism #seneca #LettersFromaStoic #moralletterstolucilius |