I am a human being, I regard nothing human as foreign to me

"How small a thing it is to refrain from harming someone you ought to help! As if it were highly meritorious when one person avoids savagery in relation to another! Won’t our precepts state that one should stretch out a hand to someone who has been shipwrecked, show the way to the wanderer, share one’s bread with the starving? Why should I mention every service one should perform, every kind of harm one should avoid doing? Instead, I can pass on the following general rule concerning human duties. This universe that you see, containing the human and the divine, is a unity; we are the limbs of a mighty body. Nature brought us to birth as kin, since it generated us all from the same materials and for the same purposes, endowing us with affection for one another and making us companionable. Nature established fairness and justice. According to nature’s dispensation, it is worse to harm than to be harmed. On the basis of nature’s command, let our hands be available to help whenever necessary. Let this verse be in your heart and in your mouth:

"I am a human being, I regard nothing human as foreign to me".

Let us hold things in common, as we are born for the common good. Our companionship is just like an arch, which would collapse without the stones’ mutual support to hold it up."

• Seneca, Letters 95.51-53