9.  Be not disgusted, nor discouraged, nor dissatisfied, if thou dost not succeed in doing everything according to right principles, but when thou hast failed, return back again, and be content if the greater part of what thou doest is consistent with man’s nature, and love this to which thou returnest; and do not return to philosophy as if she were a master, but act like those who have sore eyes and apply a bit of sponge and egg, or as another applies a plaster, or drenching with water.  For thus thou wilt not fail to + obey reason, and thou wilt repose in it.  And remember that philosophy requires only things which thy nature requires; but thou wouldst have something else which is not according to nature.—­It may be objected, Why, what is more agreeable than this [which I am doing]?  But is not this the very reason why pleasure deceives us?  And consider if magnanimity, freedom, simplicity, equanimity, piety, are not more agreeable.  For what is more agreeable than wisdom itself, when thou thinkest of the security and the happy course of all things which depend on the faculty of understanding and knowledge?

10.  Things are in such a kind of envelopment that they have seemed to philosophers, not a few nor those common philosophers, altogether unintelligible; nay even to the Stoics themselves they seem difficult to understand.  And all our assent is changeable; for where is the man who never changes?  Carry thy thoughts then to the objects themselves, and consider how short-lived they are and worthless, and that they may be in the possession of a filthy wretch or a whore or a robber.  Then turn to the morals of those who live with thee, and it is hardly possible to endure even the most agreeable of them, to say nothing of a man being hardly able to endure himself.  In such darkness then and dirt, and in so constant a flux both of substance and of time, and of motion and of things moved, what there is worth being highly prized, or even an object of serious pursuit, I cannot imagine.  But on the contrary it is a man’s duty to comfort himself, and to wait for the natural dissolution, and not to be vexed at the delay, but to rest in these principles only:  the one, that nothing will happen to me which is not conformable to the nature of the universe; and the other, that it is in my power never to act contrary to my god and daemon:  for there is no man who will compel me to this.

11.  About what am I now employing my own soul?  On every occasion I must ask myself this question, and inquire, What have I now in this part of me which they call the ruling principle? and whose soul have I now,—­that of a child, or of a young man, or of a feeble woman, or of a tyrant, or of a domestic animal, or of a wild beast?