Seneca the Younger Quotes
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Straightforwardness and simplicity are in keeping with goodness. The things that are essential are acquired with little bother; it is the luxuries that call for toil and effort. To want simply what is enough nowadays suggests to people primitiveness and squalor.
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Some cures are worse than the dangers they combat.
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The highest duty and the highest proof of wisdom - that deed and word should be in accord.
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Leisure without study is death, and the grave of a living man.
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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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Men practice war; beasts do not.
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Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
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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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Successful villany is called virtue.
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The foundation of the true joy is in the conscience.
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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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You talk one way, you live another.
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Before old age I took care to live well; in old age I take care to die well; but to die well is to die willingly.
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Four things does a reckless man gain who covets his neighbor's wife - demerit, an uncomfortable bed, thirdly, punishment, and lastly, hell.
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We suffer more in imagination than in reality.
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No possession is gratifying without a companion.
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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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If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you're needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.
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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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Vice is contagious, and there is no trusting the sound and the sick together.
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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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Let us not seek our disease out of ourselves; 'tis in us, and planted in our bowels; and the mere fact that we do not perceive ourselves to be sick, renders us more hard to be cured.
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Virtue is that perfect good, which is the complement of a happy life; the only immortal thing that belongs to mortality.
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There is no fair wind for one who knows not whither he is bound.