avoid, and what they pursue, and how they steal and how they rob, not
with hands and feet, but with their most valuable part, by means of which
there is produced, when a man chooses, fidelity, modesty, truth, law, a
good daemon [happiness] (VII. 17)?

14. To her who gives and takes back all, to nature, the man who is
instructed and modest says, Give what thou wilt; take back what thou
wilt. And he says this not proudly, but obediently, and well pleased with
her.

15. Short is the little which remains to thee of life. Live as on a
mountain. For it makes no difference whether a man lives there or here,
if he lives everywhere in the world as in a state [political community].
Let men see, let them know a real man who lives according to nature. If
they cannot endure him, let them kill him. For that is better than to
live thus [as men do].

16. No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to
be, but be such.

17. Constantly contemplate the whole of time and the whole of substance,
and consider that all individual things as to substance are a grain of a
fig, and as to time the turning of a gimlet.

18. Look at everything that exists, and observe that it is already in
dissolution and in change, and as it were putrefaction or dispersion, or
that everything is so constituted by nature as to die.

19. Consider what men are when they are eating, sleeping, generating,
easing themselves, and so forth. Then what kind of men they are when they