Aurelius - Meditations 2:11

2:11 – In the conviction that it is possible you may depart from life at once, act and speak and think in every case accordingly. But to leave the company of men is nothing to fear, if God exists; for He would not involve you in ill. If, however, He does not exist or if He takes no care for man’s affairs, why should I go on living in a world void of God, or void of providence? But He does exist, and He does care for men’s lives, and He has put it entirely in a man’s power not to fall into real ills; for the rest, if anything were an ill, He would have provided also for this, that it may be in every man’s power not to fall into it (and how could what does not make a man worse make his life worse?). But God, by nature, would not have winked at these things either out of ignorance or because (though He knew of them) He had not the power to guard against them or to put them right; neither would He have made so vast an error, from want of power or skill, as to permit good and ill to befall indifferently, both good and bad men equally. Now death, and life, good report and evil report, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, these all befall men, good and bad alike, equally, and are themselves neither right nor wrong; they are therefore neither good nor ill.
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Stoic texts:
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
Letters from a Stoic Master (Seneca)
The Discourses of Epictetus
The Enchiridion (Handbook) of Epictetus
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