Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. The strongest bond toward a sound mind is this: you have promised to be a good man, you have taken the oath. Someone will laugh at you if he tells you that this service is soft and easy. I do not want you to be deceived. The words of this most honorable oath and of that most degrading one are the same: "to be burned, to be bound, to be killed by the sword."
Those who hire out their hands to the arena, and eat and drink what they will pay back in blood, are guarded so that they suffer these things even against their will; you must suffer them willingly and gladly. They are allowed to lower their weapons, to try the crowd's mercy; you will neither lower your weapon nor beg for your life - you must die upright and unconquered. And besides, what good does it do to gain a few extra days or years? We are born with no discharge.
"How, then," you ask, "can I free myself?" You cannot escape necessities, but you can conquer them - and philosophy will give you this road.
Turn to philosophy if you want to be safe, if you want to be free from anxiety, if you want to be happy - if, in short, you want to be, which is the greatest thing of all, free; this cannot come about in any other way. Folly is a base thing, abject, sordid, servile, subject to many passions, and the most tyrannical ones at that. Wisdom dismisses these harsh masters from you - masters who sometimes rule by turns, sometimes together - and wisdom alone is freedom. There is one road that leads to it, and a straight one; you will not go astray - walk it with a firm step. If you want to subject everything to yourself, subject yourself to reason; you will rule over many, if reason rules you. From reason you will learn what and how you ought to undertake things; you will not stumble into events blindly.
You cannot give me a single person who knows how he came to want what he wants; he was not led there by deliberation but driven by impulse. Fortune runs into us no less often than we run into fortune. It is shameful not to go but to be carried along, and suddenly, in the midst of the whirlwind of events, to ask, dazed, "How did I get here?" Farewell.