124 surviving letters between Lucilius Junior and Lucius Annaeus Seneca, spanning 63-65 AD.
“Keep doing what you are doing, Lucilius: claim yourself for yourself.”
“From what you write, and from what I hear, Lucilius, I am forming a good opinion of your future.”
“You sent me a letter by the hand of someone you call your friend.”
“Keep on as you have begun, and hurry as much as you can, so that you may have longer enjoyment of a mind improved and at peace with itself.”
“I approve of you, and I am glad that you persist in your studies, putting everything else aside and making it your daily effort to become better.”
“I understand, Lucilius, that I am not merely being corrected, but transformed.”
“You ask what I think you should especially avoid.”
“"You tell me to avoid the crowd," you say, "to withdraw from people and be content with my own conscience.”
“You want to know whether Epicurus was right, in one of his letters, to criticize those who say that the wise person is c…”
“Yes, this is how it stands; I am not changing my opinion.”
“I have had a conversation with your friend.”
“Everywhere I turn, I see evidence of my old age.”
“I know you have plenty of courage.”
“I admit that affection for our own body is built into us.”
“The old Romans had a custom, preserved down to my own lifetime, of adding these first words to a letter: "If you are well, it is good; I am well.”
“I know it is already clear to you, Lucilius, that no one can live happily, or even tolerably, without the study of wisdom.”
“Throw all that away, if you are wise - or rather, so that you may become wise.”
“It is December, and the whole city is sweating.”
“I am delighted whenever I receive your letters.”
“If you are well, and if you think yourself worthy at last of becoming your own master, I am glad.”
“Do you think your trouble is with the people you wrote to me about?”
“By now you understand that you must withdraw from those glittering and corrupt pursuits, but you still want to know how this can be done.”
“Do you suppose I am going to write to you about how kindly winter has treated us, with a short and mild season, or about…”
“You write that you are anxious about the outcome of a lawsuit with which an angry opponent is threatening you.”
“As for these two friends of ours, we must proceed in different ways.”
“I was telling you only the other day that I was in sight of old age; now I am afraid I have left old age behind me.”
“"You," you say, "are giving me advice?”
“[1] Do you suppose this has happened to you alone, and do you marvel at it as though it were something new, that with tr…”
“You ask about our friend Marcellinus and want to know how he is doing.”
“I have seen Aufidius Bassus, that excellent man, broken in body and struggling against his years.”
“I recognize my dear Lucilius: he is beginning to show the man he had promised to become.”
“[1] I keep inquiring about you, and I question everyone who comes from your part of the world about what you are doing, …”
“You want these letters too, like the earlier ones, to have appended to them some sayings of the leaders of our school.”
“I grow, I exult, and shaking off my old age I feel the warmth return to me, every time that from the things you do and w…”
“[1] When I urge you so insistently to apply yourself to your studies, I am pleading my own cause: I want to have a frien…”
“[1] Urge your friend to despise, with a great spirit, those who reproach him for having sought the shade and a life of l…”
“You have promised to be a good man; you have taken the oath of enlistment.”
“[1] You are right to demand that we make this exchange of letters between us more frequent.”
“[1] The notebooks you ask for, carefully arranged and compressed into a small compass, I will indeed put together for yo…”
“[1] I am grateful that you write to me so often; for in this you show yourself to me in the one way you can.”
“You are doing an excellent thing, and one that will be good for you, if, as you write, you are persevering in your advan…”
“[1] So that fellow has already convinced you that he is a good man?”
“[1] You ask how this came to my attention, who told me that you were turning over this idea in your mind, the one you had disclosed to no one.”
“[1] Once again you make yourself out to be a person of no account, and you say that nature dealt with you grudgingly at …”
“[1] You complain that out there you have a shortage of books.”
“[1] I have received the book of yours that you had promised me, and I opened it as though I would read it at my leisure,…”
“[1] I was glad to learn, from people who come from your household, that you live on familiar terms with your slaves.”
“[1] To the letter you sent me from your journey, as long as the journey itself was, I will write back later; I need to w…”
“[1] A man is indeed slack and careless, my dear Lucilius, who is led back to the memory of a friend only when some parti…”
“I received your letter many months after you sent it, and so I thought it pointless to ask the man who delivered it how you were getting on.”
“Each of us does as best he can, my dear Lucilius.”
“[1] What is this, Lucilius, that drags us one way while we are heading another, and pushes us toward the very thing from which we long to retreat?”
“[1] What could I not be persuaded into, when I was once persuaded to go to sea?”
“Poor health had granted me a long leave; then suddenly it set upon me.”
“[1] I am just now returning from a ride in my litter, no less tired than if I had walked the whole distance I sat for; f…”
“[1] May I perish if silence is as necessary as it seems for a man who has secluded himself for his studies.”
“[1] When I had to make my way back from Baiae to Naples, I readily believed there was a storm, so as not to risk the shi…”
“[1] Never have I understood more clearly than I did today how poor our language is in words - or rather, how destitute.”
“I derived great pleasure from your letter.”
“I complain, I bring suit, I am angry.”
“[1] Let us stop wanting what we once wanted.”
“They are lying who want it to look as if a crowd of business affairs stands in the way of their pursuit of liberal studi…”
“[1] It pains me that Flaccus, your friend, has died, but I do not want you to grieve more than is fair.”
“[1] Yesterday you were with us.”
“[1] I divided yesterday with poor health: it claimed the morning for itself, and ceded the afternoon to me.”
“[1] I have seen Claranus, my old schoolmate, after many years.”
“[1] To begin with what is common to us all: spring has begun to open, but it is already sliding toward summer, when it o…”
“I endorse your plan: hide yourself away in leisure, but hide your leisure as well.”
“[1] I would rather you did not keep changing your location and leaping from one place to another.”
“[1] After a long interval I have seen your Pompeii.”
“[1] You keep consulting me on individual matters, forgetting that a vast sea divides us.”
“The matter you ask me about was once clear to me on its own account, so well had I once learned it; but it is a long tim…”
“[1] Those who suppose that men faithfully devoted to philosophy are defiant and unruly, scorners of magistrates or kings…”
“[1] Your letter gave me delight and roused me from my lethargy; it also called back my memory, which by now is sluggish and slow.”
“You complain that the letters I send you are too carelessly composed.”
“[1] You threaten me with your hostility if I leave you ignorant of anything I do from day to day.”
“[1] Today the Alexandrian ships suddenly came into view, the ones that are customarily sent ahead to announce the arriva…”
“[1] That you are plagued by frequent catarrhs and by the slight fevers which follow upon long-standing, habitual catarrh…”
“I am waiting for your letters, in which you will report to me what your tour around the whole of Sicily has shown you th…”
“[1] Today I have time to myself, owing not so much to my own doing as to the games, which have lured all the tiresome people off to a boxing-match.”
“[1] You complain that you have run into an ungrateful man.”
“[1] I have now stopped worrying about you.”
“[1] You order me to report each of my days to you, and indeed the whole of each one: you judge well of me if you think t…”
“[1] These journeys of mine, which shake the sluggishness out of me, I judge to be of benefit both to my health and to my studies.”
“[1] I had been sparing you, and I had passed over whatever knotty points still remained, content to give you, as it were…”
“I write this to you as I lie in the very country house of Scipio Africanus, having paid my respects to his shade and to …”
“[1] I suffered shipwreck before I had even boarded ship.”
“[1] You are eager to know what I think about the liberal studies.”
“[1] You ask for something useful, and necessary for one hurrying toward wisdom: that philosophy be divided, and its vast…”
“[1] Who can doubt, my dear Lucilius, that our living is a gift of the immortal gods, but our living well is a gift of philosophy?”
“Our friend Liberalis is downcast now, after the news of the fire that burned down the colony of Lugdunum [Lyons].”
“[1] You and I will agree, I think, that external things are acquired for the sake of the body, that the body is tended o…”
“[1] In the letter where you grieved over the death of the philosopher Metronax, as though he both could have and should …”
“[1] That part of philosophy which gives precepts suited to each particular role, and does not shape a person in general …”
“[1] You ask me to bring forward at once, and to set down for you in writing, the matter that I had said ought to be defe…”
“[1] And still you grow indignant at something, or complain, and you fail to understand that there is no evil in those tr…”
“[1] You are mistaken, my dear Lucilius, if you suppose that extravagance, the neglect of good morals, and the other faul…”
“[1] You must never believe that anyone is happy who hangs suspended upon his own good fortune.”
“I am sending you a copy of the letter I wrote to Marullus when he had lost his little son and was said to be bearing it weakly.”
“[1] You write that you read with the greatest eagerness the books of Fabianus Papirius entitled On Civil Affairs, and th…”
“Every day, every hour shows us how little we are, and with some fresh piece of evidence reminds us, who have forgotten o…”
“[1] Just as a man who wakes someone in the middle of a pleasant dream is an annoyance (for he robs him of the pleasure, …”
“[1] Why do you keep glancing around at those things that may perhaps befall you, but may also fail to befall you?”
“[1] I have fled to my villa at Nomentum -- and to escape what, do you suppose?”
“[1] I will tell you what you must observe in order to live more safely.”
“[1] I am rather slow in replying to your letters, but not because I am tied up with business.”
“[1] Where is that good sense of yours?”
“[1] The matter you are asking about is one of those things where our only concern with knowing is to have the knowledge.”
“[1] You want to know whether a wise man can be of use to a wise man.”
“From my estate at Nomentum I send you greetings, and I bid you keep a sound mind—that is, to have all the gods favorable…”
“[1] You have asked me what sophismata [Greek for fallacious arguments, captious puzzles of logic] are called in Latin.”
“I genuinely wish, by Hercules, that your friend could be shaped and trained as you desire, but he is being taken in hand…”
“[1] You want me to write you what I think about this question that is bandied about among our school: whether justice, c…”
“[1] You ask why in certain periods a corrupt style of speech has arisen, and how the talents of men have come to incline…”
“[1] I do not want you to be too anxious about words and their arrangement, my dear Lucilius: I have weightier things for you to attend to.”
“It has often been asked whether it is better to have moderate emotions or none at all.”
“[1] You will cook up a great deal of trouble for me, and without realizing it you will push me into a serious quarrel an…”
“(1) You demand more frequent letters from me.”
“Whenever I have discovered something, I do not wait until you say "Share it!”
“(1) Your letter wandered through several little questions, but it settled on one, and asks to have this resolved: how th…”
“You will pick a quarrel with me, I can see it now, once I lay out for you today's little problem, on which we have alrea…”
“The day has already felt its loss; it has shrunk back somewhat, yet still in such a way that there remains a generous sp…”
“(1) Worn out by a journey more uncomfortable than long, I reached my villa at Alba late at night, and I find nothing ready except myself.”
“(1) I could pass on to you many precepts of the ancients, if you do not shrink back and find it tiresome to learn such slender, painstaking concerns.”