Toil
idea · 4 works · 4 mentions · 7 anchored passages
toil · labour · care · hunger and thirst · labor · practice · toils · work
in the texts
Tusculan Disputations
Sustained exertion of mind or body, distinguished from pain but related to it through the habit of endurance it builds.
then how great is the toil of the march:
for the habit of toils makes the endurance of pains the easier.
\" Therefore in these laborious exercises pain too intervenes now and then — they are driven, struck, thrown down, fall — and the very toil draws, as it were, a kind of callus over the pain.
Letters to Lucilius
Physical or mental exertion, examined as an indifferent thing that nourishes noble spirits when rightly used.
Toil is not a good.
Toil nourishes noble spirits.
To not refuse toil is too little;
Cyropaedia
Labor and disciplined effort presented as the source of durable pleasure and successful rule.
that good things bring the greater pleasure, in proportion to the toil one undergoes beforehand to attain them;
Wherefore I maintain that we should now strain every nerve after manliness, so that we may enjoy our success in the best and most delightful manner and have no experience in that which is hardest of all.
Now if God has helped us to obtain that which men most desire, and if any one will so order these results for himself that they shall give as great pleasure as possible, such a man will have this advantage over those who are not so well supplied with the means of living:
On Hunting
The strenuous exertion (ponos) that the passage presents as the indispensable, if unwelcome, price of virtue, wisdom, piety and civic usefulness, exemplified above all by hunting.
Now the better sort are those who are willing to toil.
Unless they abound in labours and inventions and precautions, they cannot capture game.
That all desire Virtue is obvious, but because they must toil if they are to gain her, the many fall away.