1I received your letter many months after you had sent it. 1So I thought it superfluous to ask the man who brought it what you were doing. 1He must have a very good memory indeed if he remembers! 1And yet I hope that you are now living in such a way that, wherever you are, I shall know what you are doing. 1For what else are you doing than making yourself better each day, laying aside some of your errors, understanding that the faults you think belong to circumstances are your own? 1For some things we attribute to places and times. 1But those faults will follow us wherever we go.
2You know that Harpaste, my wife's female fool, has stayed on in my house as an inherited burden. 2For I myself have the strongest aversion to these freaks; 2if ever I wish to be amused by a fool, I do not have to look far; 2I laugh at myself. 2This fool suddenly lost her sight. 2I am telling you an incredible thing, but a true one: she does not know that she is blind. 2Again and again she asks her attendant to move house. 2She says the house is dark. 3Let it be clear to you that what we laugh at in her happens to us all; 3no one understands that he is greedy, no one that he is covetous.
3Yet the blind look for a guide; we wander without a guide and say: 'It is not I who am ambitious, but no one can live otherwise at Rome. 3It is not I who am extravagant, but the city itself demands great expense. It is not my fault that I am irascible, that I have not yet settled on a definite way of life; 3it is youth that does this.' 4Why do we deceive ourselves? 4Our trouble is not outside us; 4it is within us, it sits in our very vitals, and the reason we reach health with difficulty is that we do not know we are sick. 4Even if we begin to be cured, when shall we shake off such great strength in so many diseases?
4As it is, we do not even look for a doctor, who would have less work if he were called in to a fresh fault. 4Tender and untrained minds would follow one who pointed out what is right. 5No one is brought back to nature with difficulty except one who has deserted her. 5We blush to learn good sense; 5but, by Hercules, if it is shameful to seek a teacher of this thing, we must give up hope that so great a good can be instilled in us by chance. 5We must work at it, and, to tell the truth, the work is not even great, provided only, as I have said, that we begin to shape and correct our mind before its depravity hardens.
5But even when it has hardened I do not despair. 6There is nothing which persistent effort and intent and diligent care do not overcome; 6you will bring oak timbers back to straightness, however bent. 6Heat straightens curved beams, and wood that grew otherwise is shaped into what our need demands; 6how much more easily does the mind take on a shape, pliant as it is and more yielding than any liquid. 6For what else is the mind but breath in a certain state? 6And you see that breath is more manageable than any other material in proportion as it is finer. 7There is no reason, my Lucilius, why it should prevent you from having good hopes of us that wickedness already holds us, that it has long been in possession of us; 7good sense comes to no one before bad.
7We have all been taken over in advance. 7To learn virtues is to unlearn vices. 8With all the greater spirit ought we to set about correcting ourselves because a good, once handed to us, is ours to possess for ever; 8virtue is not unlearned. 8For opposites cling badly in alien ground, and so they can be driven out and expelled; 8things that come into their own place stay faithfully. 8Virtue is in accordance with nature; vices are hostile and inimical to it. 9But just as virtues, once received, cannot depart, and are easily guarded, so the first steps towards them are hard, because it is characteristic of a weak and sick mind to dread what it has not tried.
9And so it must be forced to make a beginning; 9after that the medicine is not bitter. 9For it gives pleasure even as it heals. 9With other remedies the pleasure comes after recovery; philosophy is at once wholesome and sweet. 9Farewell.