Seneca the Younger Quotes
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No wind blows in favor of a ship without direction.
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What were once vices are the fashion of the day.
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There are a few men whom slavery holds fast, but there are many more who hold fast to slavery.
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The state of that man's mind who feels too intense an interest as to future events, must be most deplorable.
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Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well-ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.
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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 Fates guide those who go willingly. Those who do not, they drag.
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Those whom fortune has never favored are more joyful than those whom she has deserted.
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A hungry people listens not to reason, not cares for justice, nor is bent by any prayers.
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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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There is no easy way from the earth to the stars.
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Freedom can't be kept for nothing. If you set a high value on liberty, you must set a low value on everything else.
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To see a man fearless in dangers, untainted with lusts, happy in adversity, composed in a tumult, and laughing at all those things which are generally either coveted or feared, all men must acknowledge that this can be from nothing else but a beam of divinity that influences a mortal body.
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Fire proves gold, adversity proves men.
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A man who examines the saddle and bridle and not the animal itself when he is out to buy a horse is a fool; similarly, only an absolute fool values a man according to his clothes, or according to his position, which after all is only something we wear like clothing.
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I am telling you to be a slow-speaking person.
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It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. ... The life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.
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Revenge is an inhuman word.
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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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Successful villany is called virtue.
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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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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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Expediency often silences justice.
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Economy is too late when you are at the bottom of your purse.