1If you are well and think yourself worthy of one day becoming your own master, I am glad. 1For the glory will be mine, if I draw you out of the place where you are tossing about with no hope of getting out. 1But this, my Lucilius, I ask and urge you: let philosophy sink into the depths of your heart, and take the measure of your progress not by speech or by writing, but by firmness of mind and the lessening of desires; 1prove your words by your deeds. 2Declaimers and those who court the applause of the crowd have one purpose; those who hold the ears of young men and idlers with varied or fluent discourse have another; 2philosophy teaches us to act, not to speak, and demands this, that each man live by his own law, that his life not be at odds with his speech, that his life itself be of one hue within itself, without discord in all its actions.
2This is the greatest duty and the greatest sign of wisdom, that deeds should agree with words, that a man should be everywhere equal to himself and the same. 2'Who will achieve this?' 2Few, yet some. 2For it is difficult; 2nor do I say this, that the wise man will always walk at the same pace, but on the same road. 3So watch yourself, to see whether your dress and your house disagree, whether you are generous to yourself and mean to your household, whether you dine frugally and build luxuriously. 3Take hold once and for all of a single rule by which to live, and make your whole life level with it.
3Some men contract themselves at home, and spread and stretch themselves abroad; 3this inconsistency is a fault and the sign of a mind that wavers and does not yet have its steady course. 4I will tell you further where this inconstancy and this discrepancy between actions and purposes comes from: no one sets before himself what he wants, nor, if he has set it, does he persevere in it, but he jumps across; 4and he does not merely change, but goes back and rolls back into the things he has abandoned and condemned. 5So, to leave aside the old definitions of wisdom and to embrace the whole manner of human life, I can be content with this: what is wisdom?
5Always to want the same thing and always to refuse the same thing. 5You need not add that little proviso, that what you want should be right; 5for the same thing cannot always please anyone unless it is right. 6So men do not know what they want, except at the very moment when they want it; 6no one has made a decision once and for all to want or refuse. 6Their judgement varies daily and turns to its opposite, and for most people life is passed as a game. 6Press on, then, with what you have begun, and perhaps you will be brought either to the summit or to a point which you alone understand is not yet the summit.
7'What will become,' you say, 'of this crowd of my household without a household estate?' 7That crowd, when it has stopped being fed by you, will feed itself; or what you cannot learn through your kindness, you will learn through poverty's. 7Poverty will keep true and sure friends; 7whoever was following not you but something else will depart. 7But is poverty not to be loved even for this one reason, that it will show you by whom you are loved? 7Oh, when will that day come on which no one will lie to do you honour! 8Let your thoughts, then, tend in this direction, care for this, pray for this, leaving all other prayers to the god: that you may be content with yourself and with the goods born from you.
8What happiness can be nearer than that? 8Reduce yourself to little things, from which you cannot fall, and so that you may do it more willingly, the tribute of this letter, which I shall pay at once, will bear on this. 9Though you may begrudge it, even now Epicurus is gladly paying on my behalf. 9'Believe me, your speech will seem more impressive on a pallet and in rags. 9For those things will not only be said, but proved.' 9I at any rate listen differently to what our Demetrius says, when I have seen him lying naked, on less than even straw; 9he is not a teacher of the truth, but a witness to it.
10'What then? 10May one not despise riches lying in one's lap?' 10Why should one not? 10He too is of great mind who laughs at riches poured around him, after long and greatly wondering how they came to him, and who hears rather than feels that they are his. 10It is a great thing not to be corrupted by living with riches; 10great is he who is poor amid riches. 11'I do not know,' you say, 'how that man would bear poverty, if he fell into it.' 11Nor do I know, Epicurus, whether that poor man of yours would despise riches, if he fell into them; 11so in each case it is the mind that must be weighed, and we must examine whether the one is indulging his poverty, and whether the other is not indulging his riches.
11Otherwise a pallet or rags is slight proof of good will, unless it has become clear that a man endures them not from necessity, but from preference. 12Moreover, it is the mark of a great nature not to rush to these things as better, but to prepare for them as easy. 12And they are easy, Lucilius; 12and indeed, when you come to them after long rehearsal, pleasant too; 12for there is in them that without which nothing is pleasant: freedom from care. 13I judge it necessary, then, to do what I wrote to you that great men had often done: to set aside some days on which we may train ourselves for real poverty by an imaginary one.
13This must be done all the more because we are soaked through with luxuries and judge all things hard and difficult. 13Rather, the mind must be roused from sleep and plucked, and reminded that nature has allotted us very little. 13No one is born rich. 13Whoever comes out into the light is commanded to be content with milk and a rag; 13from such beginnings, kingdoms cannot contain us. 13Farewell.