Nature

Do they not live against Nature who lay the foundations of baths in the sea, and do not think they swim daintily enough unless their heated pools are beaten by wave and tempest?

Do they not seem to you to live against Nature who exchange their dress with women?

Do they not seem to you to live against Nature who drink fasting, who take wine into empty veins and pass over to food drunk?

And therefore it is clear that none of the moral virtues formed is engendered in us by nature, for no natural property can be altered by habit.

The virtues therefore are engendered in us neither by nature nor yet in violation of nature;

And, that we may understand that none of these things is fortuitous, and that all these are the works of a provident and skilful Nature, those creatures which bring forth manifold offspring, as the sows, as the dogs, have been given a multitude of teats, which same teats those beasts have few which bring forth few.

But they have entrances hard and as it were horny and with many windings, because by these natures the sound carried back is amplified;

wherein it is to be wondered whether they have come together by some meeting with one another, or have been associated by Nature herself from their very birth.

Whence, then, can we more rightly begin than from our common parent, Nature?

And as to the beasts a different chief thing was given by nature to each, which each retains as its own and does not depart from it, so to man something far more excellent — although those things ought to be called excellent which have some comparison;

Who, whatever she begot — not only the animal, but even that which sprung from the earth so as to rest on its own stalks — willed that each thing should be perfect in its own kind.

For if he is well-disposed towards father and mother, and so observes the great law of nature, which is laid down alike for man and beast, that all should love their parents, then he must clearly be ill-disposed to those who have destroyed them and to their laws and their constitution.

Of these, nature is something irregular and incalculable, and peculiar to each individual;

they seek for it, and when they find it, they set it forth as a general commandment, equal and identical for all.

Root nature (prakṛti / pradhāna / mūlaprakṛti (primordial material nature)) is uncaused [not a modification of anything];

By seven forms [virtue, vice, ignorance, dispassion, lordliness, and their opposites] prakṛti / pradhāna / mūlaprakṛti (nature) binds herself by herself;

"There is nothing more delicate [modest] than prakṛti / pradhāna / mūlaprakṛti (nature)" — such is my conviction;

Observe continually that all things come to be by change, and accustom yourself to consider that the Nature of the Whole loves nothing so much as to change what exists and to make new things like them.

He is an abscess on the universe who withdraws and cuts himself off from the reason of our common nature through discontent with what befalls;

All is fruit for me that your seasons bring, O Nature;

And when he wished to ascend in the natural things, which are the matters possessing matter, to the matters that have no matter, he found between these two stations matters having a share in nature and a share in what is after nature, so he made on them his book On the Soul and his book On Sense and the Sensible.

And if art, which nature precedes, is of this description, then it is fitting that nature, which is the ruling one and the more powerful, should be of this description too;

So too an example among the natural instruments is the stomach:

but if you measure them against the law of a Nature that destroys all things and recalls them to the place from which she sent them forth, they are perishable.

and Nature seems to me, for this reason, to have made common what she had made hardest, so that the equality of fate might console us for its cruelty.

Do you not see what manner of life Nature has promised us, she who willed that the first act of men at their birth should be weeping?

For what else is Nature than God, and a divine reason implanted in the whole world and in its parts?

Nature has begotten us for both ends, for the contemplation of things and for action.

Therefore I live in accordance with Nature if I have given myself wholly to her, if I am her admirer and her worshipper.

Nature has given us an inquiring mind, and, conscious of her own skill and beauty, she begot us as spectators of her mighty pageant, since she would lose the fruit of herself if works so vast, so resplendent, so finely wrought, so radiant and beautiful in more ways than one, were displayed to an empty solitude.

Meanwhile, in accordance with what all the Stoics agree upon, I give my assent to the nature of things;

To live happily, then, is the same thing as to live according to Nature.

For we must take Nature as our guide;

The greater part of mankind, Paulinus, complains of the spitefulness of Nature, because we are born for a brief span of life, and because these allotted spaces of time run out so swiftly, so headlong, that, with very few exceptions, life leaves the rest of us in the very midst of our preparations for living.

Hence too the grievance of Aristotle, ill befitting a wise man, when he arraigns Nature:

Why do we complain of Nature?

In one's own troubles, too, one ought so to bear oneself as to grant to grief only as much as Nature demands, not as much as custom does;

' Should Nature, who first entrusted us to ourselves, call us to account, to her too we shall say:

I knew into how turbulent a fellowship Nature had shut me up.