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Moral Letters Vol II

Seneca

§ Section 6

On gathering ideas

84:6

Book Subtitle: Seneca's timeless letters of advice and wisdom.

Book Description: The second volume of Seneca's moral letters to Lucilius. Each letter contains Seneca's advice and wisdom won from a life of Roman politics.

7.

We must digest it; otherwise it will merely enter the memory and not the reasoning power.

Let us loyally welcome such foods and make them our own, so that something that is one may be formed out of many elements, just as one number is formed of several elements whenever, by our reckoning, lesser sums, each different from the others, are brought together.

This is what our mind should do: it should hide away all the materials by which it has been aided, and bring to light only what it has made of them.