opinion; and renown and health, no less than wealth, have just so much charm and pleasure-giving as he who possesses them attributes to them. (c) Every one is in good or bad case according as he thinks himself to be so. Not he whom others believe to be well off, but he who believes it himself, is happy, and in that matter the belief alone creates essential truth. Fortune does us neither good nor harm; she simply offers us their material and seed, which our soul, more powerful than she,[1] turns and applies as it pleases, being the sole cause and controller of her own happy or unhappy state.[2] (b) External circumstances[3] take savour and colour from the internal constitution, just as our garments warm us, not with their warmth, but with our own, which they are adapted to keep in and nourish;[4] who should cover with them a cold body would obtain from them the same service for its coldness: thus snow and ice are preserved.
[5](a) Certainly just as study is torment to an indolent man and abstinence from wine to a drunkard, as frugality is abhorrent to the luxurious and exercise is distressful to an effeminate and slothful man, so it is with the rest. Things are neither so grievous nor so difficult in themselves, but our weakness and cowardice make them so. To judge of great and high things, one must have a mind of the same quality; otherwise we attribute to them the defect which is ours. A straight oar always looks crooked in the water. It does not matter that the thing simply is seen, but how it is seen.[6]
Now, amongst so many arguments which in divers ways urge men to despise death and to bear pain, do we not find one to serve us? And amongst all these varieties of ideas which have persuaded others, may not each man apply to himself the one most in accord with his nature? If he can not digest the cleansing purgative powerful to eradicate the evil, let him at least take a sedative to relieve it. (c) Opinio est
- ↑ Fortune.
- ↑ See Seneca, Epistle 98.
- ↑ Accessions: probably a misprint for accessoires.
- ↑ See Plutarch, Of Vice and Virtue.
- ↑ At this point we return to the text of the first edition (1580); beginning with the story of Quintus Maximus on page 79, all the intervening matter was added in 1588 or later.
- ↑ This whole passage is taken from Seneca, Epistle 71.
