Plutarch, Consolatio ad Apollonium
Frank Cole Babbitt, Ed.

Keeping these things before our mind, we shall rid ourselves of the useless and vain extremes of mourning, since the time remaining of our life is altogether short. We must therefore be chary of it, so that we may live it in cheerfulness of spirit and without the disturbance of mournful griefs, by giving up the outward signs of sorrow and by bethinking ourselves of the care of our bodies and the welfare of those who live with us. It is a good thing also to call to mind the arguments which most likely we have sometimes employed with relatives or friends ¹ who found themselves in similar calamities, when we tried to comfort them and to persuade them to bear the usual happenings of life in the usual way and a man's lot like a man; and it is a good thing, too, not to put ourselves in the position of being able to help others to find relief from grief, but ourselves to have no profit in recalling the means through which we must cure the soul's distress—‘by healing remedies of reason’ ²—since we should postpone anything else rather than the putting aside of grief. And yet one poet ³ says that the man who in any matter ‘puts off till to-morrow’ is ‘wrestling with destruction’—a proverb which is repeated among all men. Much more, I think, is this true of the man who puts over to a future time the experiences which his soul finds so troublesome and so hard to face.