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On Virtue and Vice “A healthy and sound constitution does indeed augment the pleasures of the body, but for the soul, there can be no lasting joy or gratification unless cheerfulness, fearlessness, and courage supply a calm serenity free from storms, for otherwise, even if hope or delight smile on the soul, it is soon confused and disturbed by care lifting up its head again so that it is but the calm of a sunken rock.Pile up gold, heap up silver, build covered walks, fill your house with [… servants] and the town with debtors, unless you lay to rest the passions of the soul, and put a curb on your insatiable desires, and rid yourself of fear and anxiety, you are but […] laying out a sumptuous banquet for people who are suffering from dysentery, and can neither retain their food nor get any benefit from it, but are made even worse by it.” “You will be contented if you have learned what is good and honorable. You will live daintily and be a king in poverty and enjoy a quiet and private life as much as the public life of [a] general or statesman. By the aid of philosophy, you will live not unpleasantly, for you will learn to extract pleasure from all places and things: wealth will make you happy because it will enable you to benefit many, and poverty, as you will not then have many anxieties; and glory, for it will make you honored; and obscurity, for you will then be safe from envy.”
