The Consolations of Philosophy

Fulfilment was to be reached not by avoiding pain, but by recognizing its role as a natural, inevitable step on the way to reaching anything good.

To reduce the violence of our mutiny against events which veer away from our intentions, we should reflect that we, too, are never without a leash around our neck. The wise will learn to identify what is necessary and follow it at once, rather than exhaust themselves in protest. When a wise man is told that his suitcase has been lost in transit, he will resign himself in seconds to the fact. Seneca reported how the founder of Stoicism had behaved upon the loss of his possessions:
When Zeno received news of a shipwreck and heard that all his luggage had been sunk, he said, ‘Fortune bids me to be a less encumbered philosopher.’

Montaigne’s philosophy is one of reconciliation: ‘The most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being.’ Rather than trying to cut ourselves in two, we should cease waging civil war on our perplexing physical envelopes and learn to accept them as unalterable facts of our condition, neither so terrible nor so humiliating.