SENECA, Letters from a Stoic, Letter CIV

"The story is told that someone complained to Socrates that travelling abroad had never done him any good and received the reply: 'What else can you expect, seeing that you always take yourself along with you when you go abroad?' What a blessing it would be for some people if they could only lose themselves! As things are these persons are a worry and a burden, a source of demoralization and anxiety, to their own selves. What good does it do you to go overseas, to move from city to city? If you really want to excape things that harass you, what you're needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person...But travel won't make a better or saner man of you. For this we must spend time in study and in the writings of wise men, to learn the truths that have emerged from their researches, and carry on the search outselves for the answers that have not yet been discovered. This is the way to liberate the spirit that still needs to be rescued from its miserable state of slavery...For the only safe harbour in this life's tossing, troubled sea is to refuse to be bothered about what the future will bring and to stand ready and confident, squaring the breast to take without skulking or flinching whatever fortune hurls at us...In any event what person actually trying them [things, activities] has found them prove beyond him? Who hasn't noticed how much easier they are in the actual doing? It's not because they're hard that we lose confidence; they're hard because we lack the confidence."