To judge of great, and high matters requires a suitable soul; otherwise we attribute the vice to them which is really our own.

A straight oar seems crooked in the water it does not only import that we see the thing, but how and after what manner we see it.
After all this, why, amongst so many discourses that by so many arguments persuade men to despise death and to endure pain, can we not find out one that helps us?
And of so many sorts of imaginations as have so prevailed upon others as to persuade them to do so, why does not every one apply some one to himself, the most suitable to his own humour?
If he cannot digest a strong-working decoction to eradicate the evil, let him at least take a lenitive to ease it: ["It is an effeminate and flimsy opinion, nor more so in pain than in pleasure, in which, while we are at our ease, we cannot bear without a cry the sting of a bee.

The whole business is to commend thyself."-- Cicero, Tusc.

Quaes., ii.

22.] As to the rest, a man does not transgress philosophy by permitting the acrimony of pains and human frailty to prevail so much above measure; for they constrain her to go back to her unanswerable replies: "If it be ill to live in necessity, at least there is no necessity upon a man to live in necessity": "No man continues ill long but by his own fault." He who has neither the courage to die nor the heart to live, who will neither resist nor fly, what can we do with him?
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