Seneca the Younger Quotes
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Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all. It sets the slave at liberty, carries the banished man home, and places all mortals on the same level, insomuch that life itself were a punishment without it.
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Whatever has overstepped its due bounds is always in a state of instability.
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The greatest man is he who chooses right with the most invincible resolution; who resists to sorest temptation from within and without; who bears the heaviest burdens cheerfully; who is calmest in storms, and most fearless under menaces and frowns; whose reliance on truth, on virtue, and on God is most unfaltering.
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He who comes to a conclusion when the other side is unheard, may have been just in his conclusion, but yet has not been just in his conduct.
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It's all in your head: you have the power to make things seem hard or easy or even amusing. The choice is yours.
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It is a world of mischief that may be done by a single example of avarice or luxury. One voluptuous palate makes many more.
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We must take care to live not merely a long life, but a full one; for living a long life requires only good fortune, but living a full life requires character. Long is the life that is fully lived; it is fulfilled only when the mind supplies its own good qualities and empowers itself from within.
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The best way to do good to ourselves is to do it to others; the right way to gather is to scatter.
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Tis not the belly's hunger that costs so much, but its pride
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We are so vain as to set the highest value upon those things to which nature has assigned the lowest place. What can be more coarse and rude in the mind than the precious metals, or more slavish and dirty than the people that dig and work them? And yet they defile our minds more than our bodies, and make the possessor fouler than the artificer of them. Rich men, in fine, are only the greater slaves.
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The young man must store up, the old man must use.
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In every good man a God doth dwell.
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The world itself is too small for the covetous.
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The origin of all mankind was the same; it is only a clear and good conscience that makes a man noble, for that is derived from heaven itself.
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God never repents of what He has first resolved upon.
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Let me therefore live as if every moment were to be my last.
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Nature does not reveal all her secrets at once. We imagine we are initiated in her mysteries: we are, as yet, but hanging around her outer courts.
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The largest part of goodness is the will to become good.
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Never to wrong others takes one a long way towards peace of mind.
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Nemo tam divos habuit faventes, Crastinum ut possit sibi polliceri. Nobody has ever found the gods so much his friends that he can promise himself another day.
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Everyone rushes his life on, and suffers from a yearning for the future and a boredom with the present. But that man who devotes every hour to his own needs, who plans every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears tomorrow.
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He that will do no good offices after a disappointment must stand still, and do just nothing at all. The plough goes on after a barren year; and while the ashes are yet warm, we raise a new house upon the ruins of a former.
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Loyalty is the holiest good in the human heart.
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Money does all things for reward. Some are pious and honest as long as they thrive upon it, but if the devil himself gives better wages, they soon change their party.