You can live your whole life free and cheerful, even if people attack you with words or wild beasts tear apart your body. What could stop your mind from staying calm and peaceful? Your mind can judge things correctly and make good use of whatever happens. When trouble comes, your judgment can say to it: 'This is what you really are, this is your true nature — even though people's opinions make you seem like something else.'
Free from all compulsion in all cheerfulness and alacrity thou mayst run out thy time, though men should exclaim against thee never so much, and the wild beasts should pull in sunder the poor members of thy pampered mass of flesh. For what in either of these or the like cases should hinder the mind to retain her own rest and tranquillity, consisting both in the right judgment of those things that happen unto her, and in the ready use of all present matters and occasions? So that her judgment may say, to that which is befallen her by way of cross: this thou art in very deed, and according to thy true nature: notwithstanding that in the judgment of opinion thou dust appear otherwise: