We are troubled more often by opinion than by fact.

Letter XIII opens by praising Lucilius’s spirit, which only hardship can prove, as a boxer is proved only by having seen his own blood. Seneca then offers him some aids against fear: this sentence is the first. He says he is speaking not in the strict Stoic manner, which calls everything that makes men groan trivial, but in a milder one, and advises him not to be unhappy before the crisis comes, since the dangers he dreads may never arrive. He goes on to sort our faults into three, exaggerating, imagining and anticipating sorrow, and gives a rule for telling present troubles from future and imaginary ones.

Most of what distresses us is not harm that has happened but our idea of what may happen, so we should not suffer in advance.

Often shared as a claim that suffering is all in the mind. Seneca’s word is opinio, opinion or supposition, not imagination in the modern sense, and he says in the next breath that he is softening the Stoic line for Lucilius; the letter does not deny real troubles but asks him to stop meeting them before they come. The English usually shared is Richard M. Gummere’s translation, in copyright in the UK and the EU (he died in 1969), so it is not stored here; another form on quote sites has no known translator. The translation here is our own, from the Latin.

Life, Suffering, Emotions, Wisdom

• Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things. Epictetus
• You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. (not found) Marcus Aurelius
• Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind. (paraphrase) Aristotle
• We must remember that the future is neither wholly ours nor wholly not ours, so that neither must we count upon it as quite certain to come nor despair of it as quite certain not to come. Epicurus
• Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. Epicurus

• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger

Seneca the Younger, Moral Letters to Lucilius (64), Letter XIII (‘On Groundless Fears’), section 4 (Ep. 13.4), our own translation. Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/we-suffer-more-often-in-imagination-than-in-reality/ (31 October 2026).

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