How to Learn Philosophy Properly — Letters from a Stoic

How should you approach learning when you are burning with the desire to know everything at once? Letter 108 opens with Seneca's caution: eagerness that gets in its own way is not eagerness, it is appetite without digestion. Things are not to be gathered at random or attacked greedily in the mass.

The burden must be suited to your strength. He recalls his own time sitting at the feet of Attalus, arriving first, leaving last, pressing the teacher with questions, and what he took away: that master and student must share the same purpose. Not to display learning, but to promote and to progress.

The letter contains a remarkable passage in which Seneca describes the specific things Attalus taught him that stuck, against meat, against perfumes, against anger, and which he still keeps. Some of what he heard he only kept for a day; some he kept for life. The difference was not in the teaching but in how completely he received it.

Words prove themselves to be your own only by being lived out. And so the test of whether you have truly absorbed a philosophy is not what you can recite, but what you do.