Give power over yourself to reason
You will ask: "How can I become free?"
You cannot avoid the inevitable—you can only conquer it. "Might makes its own way." Philosophy will open this path for you. Turn to it if you want to know no harm, to be serene, happy, and, most importantly, free. This cannot be achieved any other way. Stupidity is humiliating, vile, contemptible, slavish, subject to many cruel passions. But wisdom will deliver you from these oppressive masters, who command sometimes one at a time, sometimes all at once; wisdom is the only freedom. There is only one path to it, and a straight one at that: you cannot stray from it; walk confidently!
If you want to gain power over everything, give power over yourself to reason! You will command many things if reason commands you. It will teach you how and what to undertake, and you will no longer stumble into this or that task by chance. You can't name anyone who, when desiring something, knew where it came from, for they didn't arrive at it through reflection, but stumbled upon it head-on. Fortune finds us no less often than we find her. It's shameful not to follow, but to be carried along by the current, and in the whirlpool of affairs, to ask, dumbfounded, "How did I get here?"
Bless you.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
In moments of grief and sorrow, we must remember that the world responds to our belief in how the world should be. We deliberately think the world is filled with injustice, but we lack the strength and courage to see that we are being unfair to ourselves. We believe the world is scorching us with cold, leaving frostbite on our souls, but we fail to see that our souls have long been weakened and frozen by our inner coldness and misunderstanding of who we truly are.
Philosophy, Knowledge of the Eternal—this is the only Path that will help us free ourselves from the shame of egoism and cowardice. They are like scars that have pierced the body of our soul, the result of the flogging to which stupidity condemns us in the daily judgment of our personality. And stupidity itself is the executioner who raises this whip over us, punishing us for our recklessness and irresponsibility.
We are tired and exhausted because we have forgotten who we truly are. We are creators and builders, with the power to cultivate gardens on the sandstone. And thanks to our faith and sincere work, this sandstone becomes the most fertile soil, where rose plantations bloom and lakes covered with lotuses appear. It is in these gardens, under the shade of the Tree of Wisdom, that we find refuge from the scorching sun of everyday life.
Where volcanoes of passion rage and earthquakes of complaints and accusations arise, our wisdom can create peace, where the seeds of a harmonious life sprout.
All this Power is in our hands if our hearts are in the caring hands of the Gods.
seneca
