Seneca the Younger Quotes
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That poverty is no disaster is understood by everyone who has not yet succumbed to the madness of greed and luxury that turns everything topsy-turvy.
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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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The whole discord of this world consists in discords.
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It is a tedious thing to be always beginning life; they live badly who always begin to live.
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It's the great soul that surrenders itself to fate, but a puny degenerate thing that struggles.
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Although a man has so well purged his mind that nothing can trouble or deceive him any more, yet he reached his present innocence through sin.
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Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all. It sets the slave at liberty, carries the banished man home, and places all mortals on the same level, insomuch that life itself were a punishment without it.
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To make a commencement requires a mental effort.
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Some cures are worse than the dangers they combat.
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They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.
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No possession is gratifying without a companion.
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That which we are not permitted to have we delight in; that which we can have is disregarded.
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Nothing is so bitter that a calm mind cannot find comfort in it.
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We must take care to live not merely a long life, but a full one; for living a long life requires only good fortune, but living a full life requires character. Long is the life that is fully lived; it is fulfilled only when the mind supplies its own good qualities and empowers itself from within.
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The condition of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but most wretched is the condition of those who labor at preoccupations that are not even their own, who regulate their sleep by that of another, their walk by the pace of another, who are under orders in case of the freest things in the world-loving and hating. If these wish to know how short their life is, let them reflect how small a part of it is their own.
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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.
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There is no fair wind for one who knows not whither he is bound.
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The worst thing about getting old is evil men cease to fear you
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Self-denial is the best riches.
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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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The mind does not easily unlearn what it has been long in learning.
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You cannot escape necessities, but you can overcome them.
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It is the property of a great and good mind to covet, not the fruit of good deeds, but good deeds themselves, and to seek for a good man even after having met with bad men.
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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.