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On Virtue And Vice
by
Sec. IV. Pile up gold, heap up silver, build covered walks, fill your house with slaves and the town with debtors, unless you lay to rest the passions of the soul, and put a curb on your insatiable desires, and rid yourself of fear and anxiety, you are but pouring out wine for a man in a fever, and giving honey to a man who is bilious, and laying out a sumptuous banquet for people who are suffering from dysentery, and can neither retain their food nor get any benefit from it, but are made even worse by it. Have you never observed how sick persons turn against and spit out and refuse the daintiest and most costly viands, though people offer them and almost force them down their throats, but on another occasion, when their condition is different, their respiration good, their blood in a healthy state, and their natural warmth restored, they get up, and enjoy and make a good meal of simple bread and cheese and cress? Such, also, is the effect of reason on the mind. You will be contented, if you have learned what is good and honourable. You will live daintily and be a king in poverty, and enjoy a quiet and private life as much as the public life of general or statesman. By the aid of philosophy you will live not unpleasantly, for you will learn to extract pleasure from all places and things: wealth will make you happy, because it will enable you to benefit many; and poverty, as you will not then have many anxieties; and glory, for it will make you honoured; and obscurity, for you will then be safe from envy.
[213] Happiness comes from within, not from without. The true seat of happiness is the mind. Compare Milton, “Paradise Lost,” Book i. 254, 255:–
“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
[214] Homeric Epigrammata, xiii. 5.
[215] Wyttenbach thinks these lines are by Menander. Plutarch quotes them again “On Contentedness of Mind,” Sec. xi.
[216] Hesiod, “Works and Days,” 705.
[217] Plato, “Republic,” ix. p. 571, D. Quoted again, “How one may be aware of one’s Progress in Virtue,” Sec. xii.
[218] And so Dr. Young truly says,–
“A man of pleasure is a man of pains.”
— Night Thoughts.