Seneca the Younger Quotes
-
Poverty with joy isn't poverty at all. The poor man is not one who has little, but one who hankers after more.
-
Drunkenness is nothing but a self-induced state of insanity.
-
Self-denial is the best riches.
-
I am telling you to be a slow-speaking person.
-
The mind does not easily unlearn what it has been long in learning.
-
The fates lead the willing, and drag the unwilling.
-
He that by harshness of nature rules his family with an iron hand is as truly a tyrant as he who misgoverns a nation.
-
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.
-
A man who has taken your time recognises no debt; yet it is the one he can never repay.
-
Expediency often silences justice.
-
To meditate an injury is to commit one.
-
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.
-
Cato, being scurrilously treated by a low and vicious fellow, quietly said to him, "A contest between us is very unequal, for thou canst bear ill language with ease, and return it with pleasure; but to me it is unusual to hear, and disagreeable to speak it." There are none more abusive to others than they that lie most open to it themselves; but the humor goes round, and he that laughs at me today will have somebody to laugh at him tomorrow.
-
With parsimony a little is sufficient; without it nothing is sufficient; but frugality makes a poor man rich.
-
A good mind is a lord of a kingdom.
-
Sovereignty over any foreign land is insecure.
-
I have withdrawn not only from men, but from affairs, especially my own affairs; I am working for later generations, writing down some ideas that may be of assistance to them.
-
On him does death lie heavily, who, but too well known to all, dies to himself unknown.
-
Why will no man confess his faults? Because he continues to indulge in them; a man cannot tell his dream till he wakes.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
There's one blessing only, the source and cornerstone of beatitude: confidence in self.
-
Let me therefore live as if every moment were to be my last.