Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] You are right to insist that we keep up this traffic of letters between us. Conversation does the most good, because it steals into the mind a little at a time. Set-piece lectures, poured out before a crowd, make more noise and less intimacy. Philosophy is good counsel, and counsel is never shouted. There is a time, granted, for those harangues, so to call them, when a man who wavers needs a push; but when the task is no longer kindling the wish to learn, but the learning itself, you must come down to these quieter words. They get in more easily, and they stick; you don't need many words, only ones that work. [2] They should be scattered like seed. A seed is a small thing, but once it takes hold of the right ground it unfolds its powers and spreads from a minimum into the greatest growth. Reason does the same: look at it and it covers little space; set it working and it grows. Few things get said, but if the mind receives them well, they gather strength and shoot up. Precepts and seeds, I tell you, are under the same law: they accomplish much, and they are compact. Only, as I said, let a fit mind seize them and draw them into itself; then it will generate much in its turn, and give back more than it received. Farewell.