If you are dazzled by the semblance of any promised pleasure, guard yourself against being bewildered by it; but let the affair wait your leisure, and procure yourself some delay. Then bring to your mind both points of time—that in which you shall enjoy the pleasure, and that in which you will repent and reproach yourself, after you have enjoyed it—and set before you, in opposition to these, how you will rejoice and applaud yourself if you abstain.
Where these words come from
- 95% sureThese words were traced back to where they first appeared. That source is listed below.
- The Enchiridion, sections 34 and 51; translated by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1865); Exact wording and attribution checked. Stoic counsel on the difference between anticipation and retrospective judgment, and on delay in moral development.
- The Enchiridion, sections 34 and 51; translated by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1865)
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