Seneca the Younger Quotes
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Economy is in itself a great source of revenue.
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How great would be our peril if our slaves began to number us!
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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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We should have a bond of sympathy for all sentient beings, knowing that only the depraved and base take pleasure in the sight of blood and suffering.
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The Fates guide those who go willingly. Those who do not, they drag.
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Economy is too late when you are at the bottom of your purse.
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Where reason fails, time oft has worked a cure.
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God has not revealed all things to man and has entrusted us with but a fragment of His mighty work. But He who directs all things, who has established and laid the foundation of the world, who has clothed Himself with Creation, He is greater and better than that which He has wrought. Hidden from our eyes, He can only be reached by the spirit.
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The road by precepts is tedious, by example, short and efficacious.
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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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Successful villany is called virtue.
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Leave in concealment what has long been concealed.
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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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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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My advice is really this: what we hear the philosophers saying and what we find in their writings should be applied in our pursuit of the happy life. We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application-not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech-and learn them so well that words become works.
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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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What were once vices are the fashion of the day.
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God never repents of what He has first resolved upon.
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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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If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living.
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Religion worships God, while superstition profanes that worship.
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Philosophy takes as her aim the state of happiness...she shows us what are real and what are only apparent evils. She strips men's minds of empty thinking, bestows a greatness that is solid and administers a check to greatness where it is puffed up and all an empty show; she sees that we are left no doubt about the difference between what is great and what is bloated.
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He who forbids not sin when he may, commands it
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Expediency often silences justice.