Letters from a Stoic

About the book

A selection of the letters Seneca wrote near the end of his life to his younger friend Lucilius. They read less like philosophy lectures and more like advice from someone who has thought hard about how to live. The recurring subjects are time and how carelessly we spend it, facing death without flinching, the gap between needing little and wanting much, real friendship, and the idea that philosophy is only worth anything if you practise it.

About the author

Seneca (Lucius Annaeus Seneca, c. 4 BC to AD 65) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and playwright, and for years the tutor and adviser to the emperor Nero. He was also famously rich and powerful, which makes his counsel about being indifferent to fortune both sharper and harder to take at face value. Nero eventually ordered him to take his own life.

Key ideas

• Time is the only thing truly ours, and the one thing we let people take without complaint. Guard it like money you can never earn back.
• We suffer more in imagination than in reality. Most of what we dread never arrives, and the rehearsing costs more than the event would.
• Wealth and status are borrowed conveniences at best, never the point. The free person needs little and is owned by nothing.
• Make peace with death and a great deal of fear drains out of life. A life spent dreading the end is barely lived.
• Philosophy is a practice, not a library. Read a little, apply it daily, and aim to be a better person by next week rather than merely better read.