On the value of advice
94:8
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.
8. “When by means of such doctrines you have brought the erring man to a sense of his own condition, when he has learned that the happy life is not that which conforms to pleasure, but that which conforms to Nature, when he has fallen deeply in love with virtue as man’s sole good and has avoided baseness as man’s sole evil, and when he knows that all other things—riches, office, health, strength, dominion—fall in between and are not to be reckoned either among goods or among evils, then he will not need a monitor for every separate action, to say to him: ‘Walk thus and so, eat thus and so.
This is the conduct proper for a man and that for a woman; this for a married man and that for a bachelor.’
Book: Moral Letters Vol III
Subtitle: Seneca's timeless letters of advice and wisdom.
Author: Seneca
Chapter: On the value of advice
Location: Chapter 94, Section 8
Content:
8. “When by means of such doctrines you have brought the erring man to a sense of his own condition, when he has learned that the happy life is not that which conforms to pleasure, but that which conforms to Nature, when he has fallen deeply in love with virtue as man’s sole good and has avoided baseness as man’s sole evil, and when he knows that all other things—riches, office, health, strength, dominion—fall in between and are not to be reckoned either among goods or among evils, then he will not need a monitor for every separate action, to say to him: ‘Walk thus and so, eat thus and so.
This is the conduct proper for a man and that for a woman; this for a married man and that for a bachelor.’