This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
Having these things fixed in our minds, all vain and
fiuitless sorrow will be superseded; the time that we have
all to live being but very short, we ought to spare and
[p. 332]
husband it, and not lay it out too prodigally upon sorrow,
but rather spend it in tranquillity, deserting the mournful
colors, and so take care of our own bodies, and consult the
safety of those who live with us. It is requisite that we
should call to mind what reasons we urged to our kinsmen
and friends when they were in the like calamities, when we
exhorted them to suffer these usual accidents of life with a
common patience, and bear mortal things with humanity;
lest being prepared with instructions for other men's misfortunes, we reap no benefit ourselves out of the remembrance of those consolations, and so do not cure our minds
by the sovereign application of reason. For in any thing
a delay is less dangerous than in sorrow;, and when by
every one it is so tritely said, that he that procrastinates in
an affair contests with destruction, I think the character
will more fitly sit upon him who defers the removing his
troubles and the perturbations of his mind.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. Little, Brown, and Company. Cambridge. Press Of John Wilson and son. 1874. 1.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.