Tradition. Seneca, Epistles 5.45.3-5

Tradition offers an index of good questions, not answers. The proper purpose of philosophy is not to eliminate your doubt or ennui, but to help you direct it well, toward quests that will yield good meaning & enrich the life you share with others.

Ceterum quod libros meos tibi mitti desideras, non magis ideo me disertum puto quam formosum putarem si imaginem meam peteres. Indulgentiae scio istud esse, non iudicii; et si modo iudicii est, indulgentia tibi imposuit. Sed qualescumque sunt, tu illos sic lege tamquam verum quaeram adhuc, non sciam, et contumaciter quaeram. Non enim me cuiquam emancipavi, nullius nomen fero; multum magnorum virorum iudicio credo, aliquid et meo vindico. Nam illi quoque non inventa sed quaerenda nobis reliquerunt, et invenissent forsitan necessaria nisi et supervacua quaesissent. Multum illis temporis verborum cavillatio eripuit, captiosae disputationes quae acumen irritum exercent. Nectimus nodos et ambiguam significationem verbis illigamus ac deinde dissolvimus: tantum nobis vacat? iam vivere, iam mori scimus? Tota illo mente pergendum est ubi provideri debet, ne res nos, non verba, decipiant.

I do not suppose that I must be learned merely because you ask me to send you books, any more than I would think myself beautiful if you were to request my portrait. I know that your request comes from affectionate indulgence, rather than sober judgment; and even if it does in some measure arise from judgment, still affection demands it of you. Whatever the quality of these books, then, please receive them to yourself as evidence of my own stubborn quest for the truth, not as indications of any truth that I already know. As I have never surrendered myself entirely to another, I bear no other's name (†). I believe much that comes to me from the judgment of great men, but claim also other opinions that are purely mine. The greats left us not what they found, but the quests that we must pursue, and if perchance they did find something, it was only because they sought the inevitable, which is utterly useless to us. A great deal of time they wasted in trading vapid words, deceptive arguments that demand useless cunning. We too make knots, tying our ambiguous meaning up with words and then undoing it. Do we have time for this, really? Do we know precisely the duration of our life, the hour of our death? We must direct all our mind's attention to the moment that demands foresight, lest events deceive us, never mind words.

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(†) Seneca refuses to make himself an acolyte of any great philosopher. Rather than be Epicurean or Socratic, etc., he is simply himself, with ideas that he approves and renders his own, though some of them derive from Socrates, Epicurus, and others he encounters in the world.