The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [337]
14. Countless things that happen every hour call for advice; and such advice is to be sought in philosophy.
15. Do not allow your heart to weaken and grow indifferent. Hold fast to your resolve and establish it firmly, in order that what is now resolve may become a habit of the mind.
16. If I know you well, my son, you have already been trying to find out, from the very beginning of these letters, the essence of what they bring to you.
17. Sift the letters again, and you will find it. Much of it comes from the wisdom of others, for whatever is well said by anyone is our own to take and keep.
Epistle 24
1. You remember that Epicurus wrote: ‘If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich.’
2. Nature’s wants are slight; the demands of opinion are boundless.
3. Suppose that the property of many millionaires is heaped up in your possession. Suppose that fortune carries you far beyond the limits of a private income,
4. And you accumulate many treasures; you will only learn from such things to crave still more.
5. Natural desires are limited; but those which spring from false opinion typically have no stopping-point.
6. The false has no limits. When you are travelling on a road, there must be an end; but when astray, your wanderings are limitless.
7. Redirect your steps, therefore, from idle things, and when you wish to know whether what you seek is based on a principled or a misleading desire, consider whether it can stop at any definite point.
8. If you find, after you have travelled far, that there is a more distant goal always in view, you may be right to think that you are on the wrong road.
Epistle 25
1. Make it your business, my son, to know joy. The mind that is happy and confident, able to lift itself above adverse circumstances,
2. Which is as steadfast in itself as it is considerate, just and temperate towards others,
3. Is a cheerful mind; but it is not a superficial cheer, lightly got. Rather, it comes from properly understanding yourself and the world of people.
4. The yield of poor mines is on the surface; the ores of rich mines lie underground, and make more bountiful returns for those who dig deeply.
5. I recommend to you, my son, to do the one thing that will most surely render you happy:
6. Be sceptical about things that glitter outwardly, are cheap and easy to get, and distract you from a clear understanding of what it is right to be and do;
7. Look towards the true good, and rely on what comes from your study and reflection, from your observation of life, and from the best part of yourself.
8. A sense of the good comes from a sound conscience, honourable purposes, right actions, contempt of the gifts of chance, and a rational approach to life’s choices.
9. For people who leap from one purpose to another, or do not even leap but are carried over by chance, how can they hope to achieve a fixed and lasting good?
10. Very few control themselves and their affairs by a guiding purpose they have chosen for themselves;
11. The rest do not proceed, they are merely swept along, like flotsam on a river.
12. Of these, some are held back by sluggish waters and drift slowly along;
13. Others are torn along by a more violent current, unable to stop themselves;
14. Some, which are nearest the bank, are left there motionless as the current slackens;
15. And others are carried out to sea by the onrush of the stream, and lost.
16. None of these lives are as good to live as the life considered, chosen, enriched by understanding and shaped by purpose.
17. You remember, my son, another saying by Epicurus: ‘They live ill who are always beginning to live.’
18. Some men, indeed, only begin to live when it is time for them to leave off living; some men cease living before they have begun.
19. To live at all is to live well: that is the burden of all that I have written to you,
20. For we must live not just in the world but in the world of humankind; that is where we flourish or fail,
21. That is where we can