Add to this that, according to the doctrine of Chrysippus, a man may live at leisure: I do not say that he ought to endure leisure, but that he ought to choose it. Our Stoics say that the wise man would not take part in the government of any state. What difference does it make by what path the wise man arrives at leisure, whether it be because the state is wanting to him, or he is wanting to the state? If the state is to be wanting to all wise men (and it always will be found wanting by refined thinkers), I ask you, to what state should the wise man betake himself; to that of the Athenians, in which Socrates is condemned to death, and from which Aristotle goes into exile lest he should be condemned to death? where virtues are borne down by jealousy? You will tell me that no wise man would join such a state. Shall then the wise man go to the commonwealth of the Carthaginians, where faction never ceases to rage, and liberty is the foe of all the best men, where justice and goodness are held of no account, where enemies are treated with inhuman cruelty and natives are treated like enemies: he will flee from this state also. If I were to discuss each one separately, I should not be able to find one which the wise man could endure, or which could endure the wise man. Now if such a state as we have dreamed of cannot be found on earth, it follows that leisure is necessary for everyone, because the one thing which might be preferred to leisure is nowhere to be found. If anyone says that to sail is the best of things, and then says that we ought not to sail in a sea in which shipwrecks were common occurrences, and where sudden storms often arise which drive the pilot back from his course, I should imagine that this man, while speaking in praise of sailing, was really forbidding me to unmoor my ship.

NewPP limit report Parsed by mw‐web.codfw.canary‐68f4f7c564‐xz2d2 Cached time: 20260410064455 Cache expiry: 64800 Cache expiry source: Module:PD‐US (os.date(%d)) Reduced expiry: true Complications: [vary‐page‐id, vary‐revision‐sha1, no‐toc] CPU time usage: 0.128 seconds Real time usage: 0.203 seconds Preprocessor visited node count: 427/1000000 Revision size: 19321/2097152 bytes Post‐expand include size: 8624/2097152 bytes Template argument size: 823/2097152 bytes Highest expansion depth: 9/100 Expensive parser function count: 2/500 Unstrip recursion depth: 0/20 Unstrip post‐expand size: 7708/5000000 bytes Lua time usage: 0.078/10.000 seconds Lua memory usage: 1555276/52428800 bytes Number of Wikibase entities loaded: 1/500 Transclusion expansion time report (%,ms,calls,template) 100.00% 185.619 1 -total 60.13% 111.613 1 Template:Header 18.51% 34.351 1 Template:PD-US 10.90% 20.225 3 Template:C 6.40% 11.873 1 Template:... 5.28% 9.802 1 Template:Nowrap 5.25% 9.745 3 Template:Center/s 3.57% 6.625 6 Template:Optional_style 2.12% 3.931 1 Template:SmallTOC 1.90% 3.522 2 Template:Ifsubst Render ID c89bcdbb-34a8-11f1-a179-b72f2e3982a5 Saved in parser cache with key enwikisource:pcache:1160980:|#|:idhash:canonical and timestamp 20260410064455 and revision id 10797159. Rendering was triggered because: page_view