Seneca the Younger Quotes
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No one can keep a mask on long.
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No one can be despised by another until he has learned to despise himself.
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It's unknown the place and uncertain the time where death awaits you; thus you must expect death to find you, every time, at every place.
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There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living; there is nothing harder to learn.
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Whatsoever has exceeded its proper limit is in an unstable position.
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That which achieves its effect by accident is not art.
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Indolence is stagnation; employment is life.
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No action will be considered blameless, unless the will was so, for by the will the act was dictated.
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Virtue is shut out from no one; she is open to all, accepts all, invites all, gentlemen, freedmen, slaves, kings, and exiles; she selects neither house nor fortune; she is satisfied with a human being without adjuncts.
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The willing, destiny guides them; the unwilling, destiny drags them.
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I persist on praising not the life I lead, but that which I ought to lead. I follow it at a mighty distance, crawling
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Something that can never be learnt too thoroughly can never be said too often.
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Philosophy is the art and law of life, and it teaches us what to do in all cases, and, like good marksmen, to hit the white at any distance.
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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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To strive with an equal is dangerous; with a superior, mad; with an inferior, degrading.
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He robs present ills of their power who has perceived their coming beforehand.
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When some state or other offered Alexander a part of its territory and half of all its property he told them that 'he hadn't come to Asia with the intention of accepting whatever they cared to give him, but of letting them keep whatever he chose to leave them.' Philosophy, likewise, tells all other occupations: 'It's not my intention to accept whatever time is leftover from you; you shall have, instead, what I reject.' Give your whole mind to her.
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No crime has been without a precedent.
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The rust of the mind is the destruction of genius.
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Death is a punishment to some, to others a gift and to many a favour.
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There is nothing more despicable than an old man who has no other proof than his age to offer of his having lived long in the world.
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Men love their country, not because it is great, but because it is their own.
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To want simply what is enough nowadays suggests to people primitiveness and squalor.
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Anyone can stop a man's life, but no one his death; a thousand doors open on to it.