What the obstacle asks

Don't be disgusted, or discouraged, or dissatisfied if you don't manage to do everything according to right principles; but when you fail, come back again, and be content if most of what you do is consistent with human nature, and love this thing you're returning to. Don't come back to philosophy as if it were a schoolmaster, but do as those with sore eyes do, applying a bit of sponge and egg, or as another applies a plaster, or another a soothing wash. This way you won't fail to obey reason, and you'll find rest in it. And remember, philosophy asks only for what your nature asks for; but you wanted something else, something not according to nature.—It may be objected: but what is more pleasant than that?—Isn't this exactly how pleasure deceives us? Consider whether greatness of spirit, freedom, plainness, fairness of mind, and piety aren't more pleasant. And what is more pleasant than wisdom itself, when you think of the security and the smooth course of everything that depends on the faculty of understanding and knowledge?

Things are wrapped in such obscurity that they have seemed, to philosophers—and not a few minor ones, either—altogether beyond grasping; even to the Stoics themselves they seem hard to understand. And all our assent is subject to change, for where is the man who never changes his mind? Turn your thoughts, then, to the objects themselves, and consider how short-lived and worthless they are, and that they may end up in the hands of some filthy wretch or a thief. Then turn to the characters of the people who live with you, and it's hard to put up with even the most agreeable of them, not to mention how hard it is for a man to put up with himself. In such darkness and dirt, then, and in so constant a flow of both substance and time, of motion and of things moved, I can't imagine what there is worth prizing highly, or even worth pursuing seriously. On the contrary, it's a man's duty to comfort himself and wait for his natural dissolution, not to be irritated by the delay, but to rest on these two principles alone: first, that nothing will happen to me that isn't in keeping with the nature of the universe; and second, that it's in my power never to act against my god and guiding spirit—for no one can force me to that.

On what am I now spending my own soul? On every occasion I must ask myself this question, and inquire: What do I have now in this part of me they call the ruling faculty? Whose soul do I have right now—a child's, a young man's, a weak woman's, a tyrant's, a domestic animal's, or a wild beast's?

We can learn what kind of things seem good to most people from this: if a man had truly conceived certain things as good—prudence, temperance, justice, courage—he wouldn't, having first conceived those, be able to bear listening to anything out of harmony with what is really good. But if a man has first conceived as good the things that seem good to the many, he'll listen and readily accept as fitting what was said by the comic writer. So even the many perceive the difference. Were it not so, that saying wouldn't offend and be rejected in the first case, while we accept it as fitting and clever when said of wealth and of the means that further luxury and fame. Go on, then, and ask whether we should value and consider good those things to which, once first conceived in the mind, the comic writer's words might aptly apply—that the man who has them, from sheer abundance, has no place left to relieve himself in.

I am made up of the formal and the material, and neither of these will perish into nothingness, just as neither came into being out of nothing. So every part of me will be reduced by change into some part of the universe, and that part will change again into another part of the universe, and so on forever. And by this same kind of change I too exist, and those who begot me, and so on forever, back the other way. For nothing stops us from saying this, even if the universe is governed according to fixed cycles.

Reason and the reasoning art—philosophy—are powers sufficient in themselves for their own work. They move, then, from a first principle that is their own, and make their way to the end set before them; and this is why such actions are called katorthoseis, or right actions—the word signifies that they proceed by the right road.

None of these things should be called a man's own that don't belong to man as man. They aren't required of a man, nor does man's nature promise them, nor are they what man's nature needs in order to reach its end. So the end of man doesn't lie in these things, nor does whatever helps toward achieving that end—and what helps toward that end is what is good. Besides, if any of these things really did belong to man, it wouldn't be right for him to despise them and set himself against them; nor would a man deserve praise for showing he didn't need them, nor would he be good who denied himself any of them, if these things really were good. But as it is, the more a man deprives himself of these things, or others like them, or the more patiently he bears being deprived of them, the better a man he is.

Whatever your habitual thoughts are, such will be the character of your mind—for the soul is dyed by its thoughts. Dye it, then, with a continuous series of thoughts like these: for instance, that wherever a man can live, he can also live well. But he must live in a palace—well then, he can also live well in a palace. And again, consider that whatever purpose a thing was constituted for, that is what it's constituted for and carried toward; and its end lies in that toward which it is carried; and wherever its end is, there also is its advantage and its good. Now the good of the reasoning animal is society, for it's been shown above that we're made for society. Isn't it plain that the lower exists for the sake of the higher? And things that have life are higher than things without life, and among things that have life, the higher are those that have reason.

To seek what is impossible is madness; and it's impossible for the bad not to do something of this kind.

Nothing happens to any man that he isn't formed by nature to bear. The same things happen to another, and either because he doesn't notice that they've happened, or because he wants to show a strong spirit, he stands firm and comes to no harm. It's shameful, then, that ignorance and vanity should turn out stronger than wisdom.

Things themselves don't touch the soul, not in the least; they have no entry into the soul and cannot turn or move it. The soul alone turns and moves itself, and whatever judgments it thinks fit to make, such it makes of the things presented to it.

In one sense, man is the closest thing to me, insofar as I must do good to men and put up with them. But insofar as some men set themselves up as obstacles to my proper actions, man becomes to me one of the things that are indifferent, no less than the sun, the wind, or a wild beast. Now it's true these can hinder my action, but they're no hindrance to my intentions and disposition, which have the power to act with reservation and to adapt: for the mind turns every obstacle to its activity into an aid, so that what hinders one act becomes a furthering of another; and what blocks the road helps us along it.