“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
When you're bracing for a disaster that hasn't happened.
This line comes on
About this line
Seneca wrote this to Lucilius as a man who’d watched himself spiral into dread over things that never came — the catastrophe rehearsed in advance, the disaster lived through three times before it arrives. He wasn’t dismissing suffering; he was naming the particular cruelty of the kind we build ourselves.
Why we carry this line
The disaster you live through countless times before it ever shows up — if it shows up. Most of what tortures us is quiet and invented. Naming it is half the cure, so I put it where I’d see it. And do better.
The design
Set in Roman capitals, the way Latin was cut into stone. The small dots are interpuncts, the marks Roman stonecutters carved between words.
The tee and the journal carry the same design.
Documented source
Every quote here is traced to a documented source. How we verify →