Fragments (A.6-A.10)

If you would be well spoken of, learn to speak well of others. And when you have learned to speak well, endeavor likewise to do well; and thus you will reap the fruit of being well spoken of.

Freedom and slavery are merely names of virtue and of vice; and both these are matters of will. But neither of them belongs to things in which will has no share. But Fortune is accustomed to dispose at her pleasure of the body, and those things relating to the body in which will has no share. For no one is a slave whose will is free.

Fortune is an evil chain to the body, and vice to the soul. For he whose body is unbound, and whose soul is chained, is a slave. On the contrary, he whose body is chained, and his soul unbound, is free. The chain of the body, Nature unbinds by death, or baseness for money; the chain of the soul, virtue unbinds by wisdom and experience and philosophic training.

If you would live tranquil and contented, endeavor that all who live with you may be good. And you can have them good by instructing the willing and dismissing the unwilling. For sin and bondage will fly with those who leave you, and with those who remain with you will virtue and liberty be left.

It is scandalous that he who sweetens his drink by the gift of the bees, should by vice embitter reason, the gift of the gods.

No one who is a lover of money, a lover of pleasure, or a lover of glory, is likewise a lover of mankind; but only he who is a lover of virtue.