On instinct in animals
121:22
Book Subtitle: Seneca's timeless letters of advice and wisdom.
Book Description: The final volume of Seneca's moral letters. Common Stoic themes emerge again and again: the unreliability of fortune, the ability to form Stoic resolve, and the importance of virtue.
22.
Do you not see how skillful bees are in building their cells?
How completely harmonious in sharing and enduring toil?
Do you not see how the spider weaves a web so subtle that man’s hand cannot imitate it; and what a task it is to arrange the threads, some directed straight towards the centre, for the sake of making the web solid, and others running in circles and lessening in thickness—for the purpose of tangling and catching in a sort of net the smaller insects for whose ruin the spider spreads the web?
Book: Moral Letters Vol III
Subtitle: Seneca's timeless letters of advice and wisdom.
Author: Seneca
Chapter: On instinct in animals
Location: Chapter 121, Section 22
Content:
22.
Do you not see how skillful bees are in building their cells?
How completely harmonious in sharing and enduring toil?
Do you not see how the spider weaves a web so subtle that man’s hand cannot imitate it; and what a task it is to arrange the threads, some directed straight towards the centre, for the sake of making the web solid, and others running in circles and lessening in thickness—for the purpose of tangling and catching in a sort of net the smaller insects for whose ruin the spider spreads the web?