THAT WE ARE TO AVOID PLEASURES, EVEN AT THE EXPENSE OF LIFE

I had long ago observed most of the opinions of the ancients to concur in
this, that it is high time to die when there is more ill than good in
living, and that to preserve life to our own torment and inconvenience is
contrary to the very rules of nature, as these old laws instruct us.

["Either tranquil life, or happy death. It is well to die when life
is wearisome. It is better to die than to live miserable."
--Stobaeus, Serm. xx.]

But to push this contempt of death so far as to employ it to the removing
our thoughts from the honours, riches, dignities, and other favours and
goods, as we call them, of fortune, as if reason were not sufficient to
persuade us to avoid them, without adding this new injunction, I had
never seen it either commanded or practised, till this passage of Seneca
fell into my hands; who advising Lucilius, a man of great power and
authority about the emperor, to alter his voluptuous and magnificent way
of living, and to retire himself from this worldly vanity and ambition,
to some solitary, quiet, and philosophical life, and the other alleging
some difficulties: "I am of opinion," says he, "either that thou leave
that life of thine, or life itself; I would, indeed, advise thee to the
gentle way, and to untie, rather than to break, the knot thou hast
indiscreetly knit, provided, that if it be not otherwise to be untied,
thou resolutely break it. There is no man so great a coward, that had
not rather once fall than to be always falling." I should have found
this counsel conformable enough to the Stoical roughness: but it appears
the more strange, for being borrowed from Epicurus, who writes the same
thing upon the like occasion to Idomeneus. And I think I have observed
something like it, but with Christian moderation, amongst our own people.