Seneca the Younger Quotes
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Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
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During difficult times and after mistakes and failures it is helpful to remember ... Oftentimes calamity turns to our advantage and great ruins make way for greater glories.
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To forgive all is as inhuman as to forgive none
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Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come . . . . Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate.
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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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Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
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There in no one more unfortunate than the man who has never been unfortunate. For it has never been in his power to try himself.
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Everyone rushes his life on, and suffers from a yearning for the future and a boredom with the present. But that man who devotes every hour to his own needs, who plans every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears tomorrow.
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Every journey has an end.
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They who have light in themselves will not revolve as satellites.
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The vices of idleness are only to be shaken off by active employment.
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Nothing deters a good man from doing what is honourable.
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The best way to do good to ourselves is to do it to others; the right way to gather is to scatter.
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Freedom is not being a slave to any circumstance, to any constraint, to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on equal terms.
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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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Successful villany is called virtue.
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Why do people not confess vices? It is because they have not yet laid them aside. It is a waking person only who can tell their dreams.
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There is nothing more miserable and foolish than anticipation.
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As gratitude is a necessary, and a glorious virtue, so also it is an obvious, a cheap, and an easy one; so obvious that wherever there is life there is a place for it; so cheap, that the covetous man may be gratified without expense, and so easy that the sluggard may be so likewise without labor.
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The foundation of the true joy is in the conscience.
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One must take all one's life to learn how to leave, and what will perhaps make you wonder more, one must take all one's life to learn how to die.
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Happy he whoe'er, content with the common lot, with safe breeze hugs the shore, and, fearing to trust his skiff to the wider sea, with unambitious oar keeps close to the land.
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Adversity finds at last the man whom she has often passed by.
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There is as much greatness of mind in the owning of a good turn as in the doing of it; and we must no more force a requital out of season than be wanting in it.