Seneca the Younger Quotes
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I am telling you to be a slow-speaking person.
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As for old age, embrace and love it. It abounds with pleasure if you know how to use it. The gradually declining years are among the sweetest in a man's life, and I maintain that, even when they have reached the extreme limit, they have their pleasure still.
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A man who has taken your time recognises no debt; yet it is the one he can never repay.
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Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones at hand do more toward a happy life than whole volumes that we know not where to find.
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Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.
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Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other.
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No man esteems anything that comes to him by chance; but when it is governed by reason, it brings credit both to the giver and receiver; whereas those favors are in some sort scandalous that make a man ashamed of his patron.
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The fates lead the willing, and drag the unwilling.
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It is only the surprise and newness of the thing which makes that misfortune terrible which by premeditation might be made easy to us. For that which some people make light by sufferance, others do by foresight.
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The mind does not easily unlearn what it has been long in learning.
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A man can refrain from wanting what he has not and cheerfully make the best of a bird in the hand.
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A good mind is a lord of a kingdom.
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The greatest man is he who chooses right with the most invincible resolution.
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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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Persistent kindness conquers the ill-disposed.
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Let me therefore live as if every moment were to be my last.
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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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On him does death lie heavily, who, but too well known to all, dies to himself unknown.
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Drunkenness is nothing but a self-induced state of insanity.
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He shows a greater mind who does not restrain his laughter, than he who does not deny his tears.
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Brother, the Great Spirit has made us all. . . . .
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It is the sign of a weak mind to be unable to bear wealth.
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Bear in mind that you commit a crime by injuring even a wicked brother.
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I have withdrawn not only from men, but from affairs, especially my own affairs; I am working for later generations, writing down some ideas that may be of assistance to them.