{"id":224,"date":"2017-12-29T15:14:22","date_gmt":"2017-12-29T20:14:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chasberndt.com\/?p=224"},"modified":"2017-12-29T15:15:13","modified_gmt":"2017-12-29T20:15:13","slug":"seneca-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chasberndt.com\/?p=224","title":{"rendered":"Seneca II"},"content":{"rendered":"

For we\u00a0must indeed have someone according to whom we may regulate our characters; you can never straighten that which is crooked unless you use a ruler.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t recall which of Seneca’s letters this comes from but it reminds me of the core message in letter II,\u00a0On Discursiveness In Reading<\/em> where he tells Lucilius to focus on one author at a time. His main point is that jumping from thinker to thinker does little to settle or focus the self. It also reminds me of the famous Thoreau quote: “As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”\u00a0<\/em>You need to find a thinker that you aspire to be like and follow their lead. Eventually, you will become more like this person.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For we\u00a0must indeed have someone according to whom we may regulate our characters; you can never straighten that which is crooked unless you use a ruler. I don’t recall which of Seneca’s letters this comes from but it reminds me of the core message in letter II,\u00a0On Discursiveness In Reading where he tells Lucilius to … →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quotes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chasberndt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chasberndt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chasberndt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chasberndt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chasberndt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=224"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/chasberndt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":225,"href":"https:\/\/chasberndt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions\/225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chasberndt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chasberndt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chasberndt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}