Seneca the Younger Quotes
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When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity?
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To want simply what is enough nowadays suggests to people primitiveness and squalor.
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I will have a care of being a slave to myself, for it is a perpetual, a shameful, and the heaviest of all servitudes; and this may be done by moderate desires.
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The spirit in which a thing is given determines that in which the debt is acknowledged; it's the intention, not the face-value of the gift, that's weighed.
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The great thing is to know when to speak and when to keep quiet.
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Money has never yet made anyone rich.
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To strive with an equal is dangerous; with a superior, mad; with an inferior, degrading.
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It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.
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Many men provoke others to overreach them by excessive suspicion; their extraordinary distrust in some sort justifies the deceit.
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Who can hope for nothing, should despair for nothing.
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A thing seriously pursued affords true enjoyment.
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He robs present ills of their power who has perceived their coming beforehand.
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The point is, not how long you live, but how nobly you live.
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The rust of the mind is the destruction of genius.
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He is ungrateful who denies that he has received a kindness which has been bestowed upon him; he is ungrateful who conceals it; he is ungrateful who makes no return for it; most ungrateful of all is he who forgets it.
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The greatest chastisement that a man may receive who hath outraged another, is to have done the outrage; and there is no man who is so rudely punished as he that is subject to the whip of his own repentance.
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Death is a punishment to some, to others a gift and to many a favour.
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It's the admirer and the watcher who provoke us to all the inanities we commit.
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As the soil, however rich it may be, cannot be productive without cultivation, so the mind without culture can never produce good fruit
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It is to the interest of the commonwealth of mankind that there should be someone who is unconquered, someone against whom fortune has no power.
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Chance makes a plaything of a man's life.
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Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul. Speak as boldly with him as with yourself.
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The sovereign good of man is a mind that subjects all things to itself and is itself subject to nothing; such a man's pleasures are modest and reserved, and it may be a question whether he goes to heaven, or heaven comes to him; for a good man is influenced by God Himself, and has a kind of divinity within him.
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Greatness stands upon a precipice, and if prosperity carries a man never so little beyond his poise, it overbears and dashes him to pieces.