Seneca the Younger Quotes
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The acquisition of riches has been to many not an end to their miseries, but a change in them: The fault is not in the riches, but the disposition.
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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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Who needs forgiveness, should the same extend with readiness.
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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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The primary sign of a well-ordered mind is a man's ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company
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Happy he whoe'er, content with the common lot, with safe breeze hugs the shore, and, fearing to trust his skiff to the wider sea, with unambitious oar keeps close to the land.
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Live for thy neighbor if thou wouldst live for thyself.
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Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
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The way to wickedness is always through wickedness.
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Nothing is so false as human life, nothing so treacherous. God knows no one would have accepted it as a gift, if it had not been given without our knowledge.
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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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Friendship always benefits; love sometimes injures.
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What narrow innocence it is for one to be good only according to the law.
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The condition of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but most wretched is the condition of those who labor at preoccupations that are not even their own, who regulate their sleep by that of another, their walk by the pace of another, who are under orders in case of the freest things in the world-loving and hating. If these wish to know how short their life is, let them reflect how small a part of it is their own.
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There is about wisdom a nobility and magnificence in the fact that she doesn't just fall to a person's lot, that each man owes her to his own efforts, that one doesn't go to anyone other than oneself to find her.
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Let us bear with magnanimity whatever it is needful for us to bear.
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Take away ambition and vanity, and where will be your heroes and patriots?
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He who has fostered the sweet poison of love by fondling it, finds it too late to refuse the yoke which he has of his own accord assumed.
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We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much-vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?
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He that makes himself famous by his eloquence, justice or arms illustrates his extraction, let it be never so mean; and gives inestimable reputation to his parents. We should never have heard of Sophroniscus, but for his son, Socrates; nor of Ariosto and Gryllus, if it had not been for Xenophon and Plato.
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Leisure without study is death, and the grave of a living man.
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You talk one way, you live another.
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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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It is a world of mischief that may be done by a single example of avarice or luxury. One voluptuous palate makes many more.