Letters 67.11

What? Do you think that those things only are desirable which come to us amid pleasure and ease, and which we bedeck our doors to welcome? There are certain goods whose features are forbidding. There are certain prayers which are offered by a throng, not of men who rejoice, but of men who bow down reverently and worship.

Seneca, Letters to Lucilius 67.11, translated by Richard Mott Gummere