Letters 117.26

“Wisdom is a Good, but being wise is not a Good;” such talk results for us in the judgment that we are not wise, and in making a laughing-stock of this whole field of study—on the ground that it wastes its effort on useless things. Suppose you knew that this question was also debated: whether future wisdom is a Good? For, I beseech you, how could one doubt whether barns do not feel the weight of the harvest that is to come, and that boyhood does not have premonitions of approaching young manhood by any brawn and power? The sick person, in the intervening period, is not helped by the health that is to come, any more than a runner or a wrestler is refreshed by the period of repose that will follow many months later.

Seneca, Letters to Lucilius 117.26, translated by Richard Mott Gummere