FROM DE BENEFICIIS.
Nature is not without God nor is God without nature. Both are the same and their functions are the same. So, too, nature, destiny, fortune, are all the names of the same God.
It is the mark of a noble and generous soul to be helpful, to do good; he who confers favors, imitates the gods.
Beneficence always makes haste; what one does willingly one does quickly.
We owe no thanks for a favor that has for a long time adhered to the hands of the giver, as it were; which he seems to have let go with reluctance and which one might almost say had been wrested from him.
Those favors are most gratifying to us that are deliberately and willingly offered, and in connection with which the only hesitancy is on the part of the recipient.
I do not make the favors I confer a matter of public record.
He who intends to be grateful ought to think about requiting a favor as soon as he receives it.
This is the law of beneficence between two persons: the one should forthwith forget that he has given; the other should never forget that he has received.
You buy from the physician a thing that is above price, life and health; from the teacher of belles-lettres, acquaintance with the liberal arts. Yet it is not the value of these things that you pay for but their pains, because when they are serving us they give up their private business to devote themselves to us.
The sun rises for the evil also.
God has given certain benefactions to all men, and from which none are excluded.
Who is so wretched, so despised, who born to so hard and sorrowful a destiny that he has never perceived the munificence of the gods? Seek out even those who bewail their fate and who are always complaining, you will not find among the entire number one who has not experienced the beneficence of heaven; there is not one for whom there has not flowed something from the most inexhaustible of all fountains.
Add, now, that external circumstances do not coerce the gods, but their sempiternal will is their law. They have established an order of events which they do not change. The gods never repent of their first purpose.
Beneficence consists not in what is done or given, but in the spirit of the doer or giver.
It is a most glorious work to save even the unwilling and refractory.
The door to virtue is closed to no one; it is open to all, admits all; virtue invites everybody, free-born, freedmen, slaves, kings and exiles. It selects neither class nor condition, it seeks the man only.
Nature directs us to do good to all men whether bond or free, free-born or emancipated slaves. Wherever there is a human being, there is a place for beneficence.
He who reasons thus (like Epicurus), does not hear the voices of supplicants and the prayers offered everywhere, in public and private, with hands outstretched toward heaven. This could not be, nor is it possible that all men should have willingly consented to the folly of addressing deaf divinities and powerless gods, if they had not recognized their benefactions, sometimes given spontaneously, sometimes in answer to prayer, always great, timely, averting by their intervention impending disasters.