The happy life
idea · 4 works · 6 mentions · 11 anchored passages
happy life · the happy life · beata vita · happiness · living happily · the highest good · true happiness
in the texts
Letters to Lucilius
The state of secure well-being, defined by Seneca as residing in the mind rather than in external goods or wealth.
What then is it in which men err, when all desire the happy life?
that the happy man is not he whom the crowd calls so, to whom great wealth has flowed, but he who has all his good in his mind, upright and exalted and trampling on mutable things, who sees no one with whom he would wish to change places, who values a man by that part alone in which he is a man, who uses Nature for his teacher, conforms himself to her laws, lives as she has prescribed, from whom n …
they do not know that the happy life is one.
On Moral Ends
The state of complete and stable well-being that all philosophy is said to aim at, argued to require security and virtue rather than fortune-dependent pleasure.
For if the happy life can be lost, it cannot be happy.
For the happy life is wont to be spoken of not in some part, but in the perpetuity of time;
So fortune becomes the mistress of the happy life — fortune, which Epicurus says crosses the wise man but little.
Tusculan Disputations
The state of eudaimonia or blessedness under debate: whether it is constituted by virtue alone or requires external and bodily goods too.
to whom too — if it please the gods — the wise man seems always happy.
It does not seem to me that virtue can be sufficient for living happily.
These things are thrown even on the rack, to which the happy life does not aspire.
On the Happy Life
The central object of inquiry in the treatise: a life in harmony with nature and grounded in virtue rather than fortune or pleasure.
True happiness, therefore, is set in virtue.
whatever I have feared—good gods, how much lighter it was than what I coveted!
Why do I not rather seek some good that I may feel in the using of it, not one that I may display?