1Throw away all those things, if you are wise, or rather so that you may be wise, and strive towards a sound mind at full speed and with all your strength. 1If there is anything by which you are held, either untie it or cut it. 1'My family estate,' you say, 'detains me; 1I want to arrange it so that it can support me while I do nothing, so that neither poverty may be a burden to me nor I to anyone else.' 2When you say this, you do not seem to know the power and potency of that good which you are considering. 2You do indeed see the sum of the matter, how much philosophy is of use, but you do not yet discern its parts precisely enough, nor do you yet know how much it helps us everywhere, how it both gives aid, to use Cicero's word, in the greatest matters and comes down to the smallest.
2Believe me, call her in to your council; 2she will advise you not to sit over your accounts. 3Surely what you are seeking, and what you want to gain by this delay, is that you may not have to fear poverty; 3but what if it is something to be sought? 3Riches have stood in the way of many when it came to practising philosophy; 3poverty is unencumbered, it is free from care. 3When the trumpet has sounded, it knows that it is not the one being attacked; 3when the alarm of fire has been raised, it asks how to get out, not what to carry out; 3if it must go to sea, the harbour is not in uproar, nor are the shores disturbed by the retinue of one man.
3No crowd of slaves surrounds it, for whose feeding one must pray for the fertility of lands beyond the sea. 4It is easy to feed a few bellies, well trained and desiring nothing else than to be filled. 4Hunger costs little, fastidiousness much. 4Poverty is content to satisfy pressing needs. 4What reason is there, then, for you to refuse her as a companion, whose ways the sane rich man imitates? 5If you want to have your mind free, you must either be poor or like a poor man. 5Study cannot be healthful without attention to frugality; 5and frugality is voluntary poverty. 5So away with those excuses: 'I do not yet have as much as is enough; 5when I have reached that sum, then I shall give myself wholly to philosophy.' 5And yet nothing must be acquired before this thing, which you put off and acquire after everything else; 5it is with this that you must begin.
5'I want,' you say, 'to acquire the means to live.' 5Acquire and learn at the same time; 5if anything forbids you to live well, it does not forbid you to die well. 6There is no reason why poverty should call us away from philosophy, nor even want. 6For those hastening towards it must endure even hunger. 6Some have endured hunger in sieges, and what other reward for their endurance did they have than not falling into the power of the victor? 6How much greater is what is promised here: everlasting freedom, and fear of no one, neither man nor god. 6And indeed one must come to these things even when starving.
7Armies have endured the lack of all things, have lived on the roots of plants, and have borne hunger by means foul to speak of. 7All this they suffered for a kingdom, and, to make you marvel the more, another's. 7Will anyone hesitate to bear poverty, in order to free his mind from madness? 7So we need not acquire wealth first; 7one may reach philosophy even without travelling money. 8So it is. 8When you have everything, will you then want to have wisdom too? 8Is this to be the last tool of life and, so to speak, an appendage? 8No, if you have anything, practise philosophy now (for how do you know whether you do not already have too much?); if you have nothing, seek this before anything else.
9'But I should lack necessities.' 9In the first place, they will not be able to be lacking, because nature asks for very little, and the wise man adapts himself to nature. 9But if the utmost necessity has befallen him, he will promptly depart from life and cease to be a trouble to himself. 9But if the means by which his life can be prolonged are scanty and narrow, he will make the best of it, and, not worried or anxious about anything beyond necessities, he will give his belly and his shoulders their due, and free from care and cheerful he will laugh at the busy pursuits of the rich and the rushing about of those hurrying after riches, and will say: 'Why do you yourself put yourself off for so long?
10Will you wait for the profit from interest, or the gain from merchandise, or the will of a rich old man, when you could become rich at once? 10Wisdom pays wealth in ready cash: to whomever it has made wealth superfluous, it has given it.' 10These remarks apply to others; 10you are nearer to the rich. 10Change the age you live in, and you have too much. 10But what is enough is the same in every age. 11I could have closed my letter at this point, had I not trained you badly. 11No one can greet the kings of the Parthians without a gift; 11I may not say farewell to you for nothing.
11What then? 11I shall borrow from Epicurus: 'For many, the acquiring of riches has been not an end of their miseries but a change in them.' 12Nor do I wonder at this. 12For the fault is not in things, but in the mind itself. 12That which had made poverty burdensome to us has made riches burdensome too. 12Just as it makes no difference whether you lay a sick man on a wooden bed or a golden one (wherever you move him, he will take his disease with him), so it makes no difference whether a sick mind is placed amid riches or amid poverty. 12Its trouble follows it. 12Farewell.