Discourses: Book 4 4 : 3

Come, if you have acted like this and devoted yourself to these things, have you done anything worse than reading a thousand lines, or writing a thousand? For when you eat, are you annoyed because you are not reading? Are you not satisfied to be eating in accordance with the principles you learned by reading? And when you bathe and take exercise? Why, then, are you not consistent in everything, both when you approach Caesar, and when you approach So-and-so? If you are maintaining the character of a man of tranquillity, of imperturbability, of sedateness, if you are observing what happens rather than being yourself observed, if you are not envying those who are preferred in honour above you, if the mere subject-matter of actions does not dazzle you, what do you lack? Books? How, or for what end? What, is not the reading of books a kind of preparation for the act of living? But the full measure of the act of living is made up of things other than books. It is as though the athlete on entering the stadium were to fall a-wailing because he is not exercising outside. This was what you exercised for, this is the purpose of your jumping-weights, your wrestler's sand, your young training partners. And are you now asking for these things, when the time for action is come? It is as if, when in the sphere of assent we were surrounded with sense-impressions, some of them convincing, and others not convincing, we should not wish to distinguish between them, but to read a treatise On Comprehension!