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Seneca · Letter LXXXV.1

Bravery is not thoughtless rashness, nor love of danger, nor the courting of fearsome things. It is the knowledge which enables us to distinguish between what is truly evil and what is not.

Seneca, Letters from a Stoic (Letter LXXXV.1)

What this means

Seneca refuses to call recklessness courage. True bravery is knowledge, the ability to tell what is genuinely evil from what only looks frightening. Once you can make that distinction, much of what scares people loses its grip, because most of it was never evil to begin with.

On reason, fear.

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Letters from a Stoic

Seneca · trans. Robin Campbell · Penguin Classics

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