Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I grow, I exult, I shed my old age and feel young again whenever I understand from what you do and write how far you have surpassed even yourself - for you left the common crowd behind long ago. If a farmer takes delight in a tree he has brought to fruit, if a shepherd finds pleasure in the young of his flock, if no one looks at his foster-child except as if that boy's youth were his own, what do you suppose happens to those who have raised minds and see, suddenly grown, what they shaped when tender?
I claim you for myself; you are my work. When I saw your natural gifts, I laid my hand on you, urged you on, applied the spurs, and did not let you go along slowly but kept pressing you forward; and now I do the same, except now I urge on a runner, one who in turn urges me on.
"What is that," you ask, "which I still lack?" In this there is a very great deal - not in the way people say the beginning is half of any whole undertaking. This matter is a question of character; and so wanting to become good is a large part of goodness. Do you know whom I call good? The complete man, the finished one, whom no force, no compulsion can make bad.
This is the man I foresee in you, if you persevere, if you press on, if you manage things so that all your deeds and words agree with each other and answer to one another, struck from a single mold. A mind is not on the right path if its actions are at odds with each other. Farewell.