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Quote by Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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Letters from a Stoic

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Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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“The rain began to fall harder, and it distracted him, but he tried to pull himself back because he felt on the verge of understanding something large and important. It seemed to him that this moment—the light and wind, the sweep of fields, the falling rain, the lowing cows, Leah’s form as it twisted to one side and then another—captured a sort of life that he longed for, a life of order and harsh beauty, and although this was his farm and his vision, it did not seem to be his life. It seemed instead to be the thing for which he must daily give up his life, an act of submission to something he could not name and only rarely, in moments such as these, have a sense of. Life during these moments seemed neither lost nor ruined but a power to be shared, as the grass shares its power with the living things that devour it.”

“And if I am not mistaken here is the secret of the greatness that was Spain. In Spain it is men that are the poems, the pictures and the buildings. Men are its philosophies. They lived, these Spaniards of the Golden Age; they felt and did; they did not think. Life was what they sought and found, life in its turmoil, its fervour and its variety. Passion was the seed that brought them forth and passion was the flower they bore. But passion alone cannot give rise to a great art. In the arts the Spaniards invented nothing. They did little in any of those they practised, but give a local colour to a virtuosity they borrowed from abroad. Their literature, as I have ventured to remark, was not of the highest rank; they were taught to paint by foreign masters, but, inapt pupils, gave birth to one painter only of the very first class; they owed their architecture to the Moors, the French and the Italians, and the works themselves produced were best when they departed least from their patterns. Their preeminence was great, but it lay in another direction: it was a preeminence of character. In this I think they have been surpassed by none and equalled only by the ancient Romans. It looks as though all the energy, all the originality, of this vigorous race had been disposed to one end and one end only, the creation of man. It is not in art that they excelled, they excelled in what is greater than art--in man. But it is thought that has the last word.”

“Watu wakikuonyesha tabia zao za ndani kabisa usisubiri wakuonyeshe tena ndiyo uwaamini. Waamini kwa mara ya kwanza. Mtu, kwa mfano, akionyesha kwa mara ya kwanza kuwa si mwaminifu mwamini. Anajijua zaidi kuliko unavyomjua. Aidha, mtu akikwambia anakupenda halafu akakupiga ni mnafiki. Maneno yake yatasema anakupenda, vitendo vyake vitasema hakupendi. Ukiwa makini na matendo ya mtu, si maneno yake, utamjua. Sikiliza maoni ya watu! Kuwa makini na matendo ya mtu.”