XV. No one of these will force
you to die, but all will teach you how to die; no one of these will wear out
your years, but each will add his own years to yours; conversations with no one
of these will bring you peril, the friendship of none will endanger your life,
the courting of none will tax your purse. From them you will take whatever you
wish; it will be no fault of theirs if you do not draw the utmost that you can
desire. What happiness, what a fair old age awaits him who has offered himself
as a client to these! He will have friends from whom he may seek counsel on
matters great and small, whom he may consult every day about himself, from whom
he may hear truth without insult, praise without flattery, and after whose
likeness he may fashion himself.
We are wont to say that it was not in our power to choose the parents who fell
to our lot, that they have been given to men by chance; yet we may be the sons
of whomsoever we will. Households there are of noblest intellects; choose the
one into which you wish to be adopted; you will inherit not merely their name,
but even their property, which there will be no need to guard in a mean or
niggardly spirit; the more persons you share it with, the greater it will become.
These will open to you the path to immortality, and will raise you to a height
from which no one is cast down. This is the only way of prolonging
mortality—nay, of turning it into immortality. Honours, monuments, all that
ambition has commanded by decrees or reared in works of stone, quickly sink to
ruin; there is nothing that the lapse of time does not tear down and remove. But
the works which philosophy has consecrated cannot be harmed; no age will
destroy them, no age reduce them; the following and each succeeding age will
but increase the reverence for them, since envy works upon what is close at
hand, and things that are far off we are more free to admire. The life of the
philosopher, therefore, has wide range, and he is not confined by the same bounds
that shut others in. He alone is freed from the limitations of the human race;
all ages serve him as if a god. Has some time passed by? This he embraces by
recollection. Is time present? This he uses. Is it still to come? This he
anticipates. He makes his life long by combining all times into one.
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