Seneca the Younger Quotes
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Upon occasion we should go as far as intoxication.... Drink washes cares away, stirs the mind from its lowest depths.... But in liberty moderation is wholesome, and so it is in wine.... We ought not indulge too often, for fear the mind contract a bad habit, yet it is right to draw it toward elation and release and to banish dull sobriety for a little.
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There is no evil that does not promise inducements. Avarice promises money; luxury, a varied assortment of pleasures; ambition, a purple robe and applause. Vices tempt you by the rewards they offer.
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The kind of solace that arises from having company in misery is spiteful.
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Trifling trouble find utterance; deeply felt pangs are silent.
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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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Nothing is so contemptible as the sentiments of the mob.
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Epicurus says, "gratitude is a virtue that has commonly profit annexed to it." And where is the virtue that has not? But still the virtue is to be valued for itself, and not for the profit that attends it.
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Reason wishes that the judgement it gives be just; anger wishes that the judgement it has given seem to be just.
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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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People do not die - they kill themselves.
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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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A dwarf is small even if he stands on a mountain; a colossus keeps his height, even if he stands in a well.
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Chance makes a plaything of a man's life.
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As gratitude is a necessary, and a glorious virtue, so also it is an obvious, a cheap, and an easy one; so obvious that wherever there is life there is a place for it; so cheap, that the covetous man may be gratified without expense, and so easy that the sluggard may be so likewise without labor.
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As fate is inexorable, and not to be moved either with tears or reproaches, an excess of sorrow is as foolish as profuse laughter; while, on the other hand, not to mourn at all is insensibility.
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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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Greed's worst point is its ingratitude.
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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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Pain, scorned by yonder gout-ridden wretch, endured by yonder dyspeptic in the midst of his dainties, borne bravely by the girl in travail. Slight thou art, if I can bear thee, short thou art if I cannot bear thee!
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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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Death is a punishment to some, to others a gift and to many a favour.
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To strive with an equal is dangerous; with a superior, mad; with an inferior, degrading.
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As Lucretius says: 'Thus ever from himself doth each man flee.' But what does he gain if he does not escape from himself? He ever follows himself and weighs upon himself as his own most burdensome companion. And so we ought to understand that what we struggle with is the fault, not of the places, but of ourselves
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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.