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.
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 …
What then is it in which men err, when all desire the happy life?
If there is someone less happy than another, it follows that he will desire the life of the other, the happier man, more than his own.
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.
But he who thinks the happy life is produced by pleasure — how will he be consistent with himself, if he denies that pleasure grows by length of time?
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.
nor is any other notion subjoined to this word, when we say \"happy,\" save a heaped-up embrace of goods, with all evils set apart.
It does not seem to me that virtue can be sufficient for living happily.
and she recalls many things about Marcus Atilius, Quintus Caepio, Manius Aquilius, and prudence herself holds back the happy life, when it tries to go upon the rack — if you prefer to use images rather than the things themselves — and denies that it has anything in common with pain and torment.
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.
The happy life, therefore, is the one that is in harmony with its own nature, and it can be attained in no other way than if first the mind is sound and in perpetual possession of its soundness;
for what is to prevent us from calling the happy life a soul that is free and upright and undaunted and steadfast, set beyond fear and beyond desire, for which the one good is honour and the one evil baseness, while all else is a worthless crowd of things that neither takes away anything from the happy life nor adds anything to it, coming and going without increase or diminution of the highest good?
When the happy life is in question, there is no reason for you to answer me in the manner of a division of the senate: