Seneca - Moral Letters - 88: On Liberal and Vocational Studies

This is my own recording of a public domain text. It is not copied and I retain the copyright.
The Moral Letter to Lucilius are a collection of 124 letters which were written by Seneca the Younger at the end of his life, during his retirement, and written after he had worked for the Emperor Nero for fifteen years. (These Moral Letters are the same letters which Tim Ferriss promotes in the Tao of Seneca)
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Translated by Richard Mott Gummere: en.wikisource....
Notes:
“there is only one really liberal study, - that which gives a man his
liberty.”
“Show me rather, by the example of Ulysses, how I am to love my
country, my wife, my father, and how, even after suffering
shipwreck, I am to sail toward these ends, honourable as they
are.”
“You know what a straight line is; but how does it benefit you if
you do not know what is straight in this life of ours?”
“For just as I know that all things can happen, so I know, too, that
they will not happen in every case. I am ready for favourable events
in every case, but I am prepared for evil.”
*emetic: a medicine or other substance which causes vomiting
“For what good does it do us to guide a horse and control his
speed with the curb, and then find that our own passions, utterly
uncurbed, bolt with us? Or to beat many opponents in wrestling
or boxing, and then to find that we ourselves are beaten by
anger?”
“Why, then, do we educate our children in the liberal studies?” it
is not because they can bestow virtue, but because they prepare
the soul for the reception of virtue
“This desire to know more than is sufficient is a sort of
intemperance. Why? Because this unseemly pursuit of the
liberal arts makes men troublesome, wordy, tactless, self-satisfied
bores, who fail to learn the essentials just because they have
learned the non-essentials.”
“It is at the cost of a vast outlay of time and of vast discomfort to
the ears of others that we win such praise as this: ‘What a learned
man you are!’ Let us be content with this recommendation, less
citified though it be: ‘What a good man you are!’
“…think how much superfluous and unpractical matter the
philosophers contain! Of their own accord they also have
descended to establishing nice divisions of syllables, to
determining the true meaning of conjunctions and prepositions;
they have been envious of the scholars, envious of the
mathematicians. They have taken over into their own art all the
superfluities of these other arts; the result is that they know more
about careful speaking than about careful living.”
#stoicism #seneca #LettersFromaStoic #moralletterstolucilius