It is better to live lying on the grass, confiding in divinity and yourself, than to lie on a golden bed with perturbation.
You will not be in want of any thing, which it is in the power of Fortune to give and take away.[80]
Despise all those things, which when liberated from the body you will not want; and exercising yourself in those things of which when liberated from the body you will be in want, invoke the Gods to become your helpers.[81]
Neither is it possible to conceal fire in a garment, nor a base deviation from rectitude in time.
Wind indeed increases fire, but custom love.[82]
Those alone are dear to divinity, who are hostile to injustice.[83]
Those things which the body necessarily requires, are easily to be procured by all men, without labor and molestation; but those things to the attainment of which labor and molestation are requisite, are objects of desire, not to the body, but to depraved opinion. Aristoxenus Pythag. Stob. p. 132.
Of desire also, he [i. e. Pythagoras] said as follows: This passion is various, laborious, and very multiform. Of desires however, some are acquired and adventitious, but others are connascent. But he defined desire itself to be a certain tendency and impulse of the soul, and an appetite of a plenitude or presence of sense, or of an emptiness and absence of it, and of non-perception. He also said, that there are three most known species of erroneous and depraved desire, viz. the indecorous, the incommensurate, and the unseasonable. For desire is either immediately indecorous, troublesome, and illiberal; or it is not absolutely so, but is more vehement and lasting than is fit. Or in the third place, it is impelled when it is not proper; and to objects to which it ought not to tend. Ex Aristoxeni Pythag. Sententiis. Stob. p. 132.
Endeavour not to conceal your errors by words, but to remedy them by reproofs. Pythagoras. Stob. p. 146.
It is not so difficult to err, as not to reprove him who errs. Pythagoras. Stob. p. 147.