'That measure,' I said, 'must everywhere be preserved and everywhere loved, if our return to God lies at heart with you.' With these words the discussion was brought to a close, and we departed. It happened that I wrote the book On the Happy Life not after the books Against the Academics, but in the midst of them. For it arose on the occasion of my birthday and was completed in a discussion lasting three days, as the work itself sufficiently shows. In that book it was established among us, who were inquiring together, that there is no happy life except the perfect knowledge of God. But one thing displeases me there: that to Mallius Theodorus, to whom I wrote that very book, though he was a learned and Christian man, I attributed more than I ought,
and that even there I often named Fortune; and that I said the happy life dwells, during the time of this present life, only in the mind of the wise man—whatever the condition of his body may be—whereas the Apostle hopes for the perfect knowledge of God, that is, the knowledge than which a man can have none greater, in the life to come, which alone is to be called the happy life, where also the body, incorruptible and immortal, will be made subject to its own spirit without any trouble or resistance. To be sure, I found this book mutilated in our own copy and lacking not a little, and it was thus that it was transcribed by certain of the brethren; nor have I yet found it whole in anyone's possession, from which I might correct it, at the time when I reviewed these works. This book begins thus: 'If to the harbour of philosophy...'