De consolatione ethnica et christiana, censura theologica

it is impatience, if you are unwilling to bear those things which others, who were much better than you, have borne.
7. That virtue is much more capable of raising and cheering us up than adverse events are capable of casting us down and troubling us.
8. Rightly said by Bias: original: "Sola bona conscientia, caret in uita metu." A good conscience alone is without fear in life. From this it follows that the wound of conscience more often ignites and increases pain, which, however, once fear is at last banished, the pursuit of a good conscience, which recalls tranquility of mind, can soothe.
9. If servitude can also be absent from evils, they are less bitter. It is absent when the mind is well-conscious of itself. According to the noble saying of Periander: original: "Sola bona conscientia, libertas est." A good conscience alone is liberty.
10. But if Cicero truly said: "The foolish are tormented by the consciousness of their evils, but the wise are delighted by the grateful recollection of past goods," who, being prudent, would doubt that even in adversity, that liberal pleasure diminishes and lightens pain? 2. De Finibus On the Ends of Good and Evil.
11. But if no theater is greater for virtue than conscience, as the same man elegantly taught in 2. Tusculan Disputations, who would doubt that for the Wise man, in the midst of adversity, the consciousness of virtue is a greater solace and pleasure than the consciousness and trust of vices and crimes and impunity could be to the wicked, even in the midst of delights?
12. That evil is not to be doubled by impatience. "Simply," says Euripides, "when it is permitted to bear pain, do not bear it double." Aristotle, however, correctly judged that some are moved by great passions, others by small ones, and some by no prominent cause at all. For it is not of little importance to the increasing or decreasing of pains whether the mind is ἀνύπνυτος thoughtless/unawakened, which is easily moved, or constant καὶ τετράγωνος and four-square/well-grounded.
13. An evil which a person has brought upon himself through his own fault ought to hurt less, as there are many αὐθαίρετα πήματα self-chosen sufferings. Not entirely imprudently, that man says in Euripides: "Since you dared to commit what is not honest, suffer also what is not pleasing." In Hecuba.
14. There is solace, however, in the fact that, as Euripides says, "The contest of patience is of such a kind that he who is defeated becomes better than the victor himself."
15. If that saying of Euripides seems Stoic to anyone: τὰς τῆς κρατέντων ἀμαθίας ἀεὶ φόβος the ignorance of those in power is always a fear; or let him ponder that of Pythagoras: "Consider it a great skill that you can bear the ineptitude of others."