Seneca the Younger Quotes
-
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.
-
Shall I tell you what philosophy holds out to humanity? Counsel...You are called in to help the unhappy.
-
The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.
-
Crime oft recoils upon the author's head.
-
There are no greater wretches in the world than many of those whom people in general take to be happy.
-
Simple is the language of truth.
-
How much better to pursue a straight course and eventually reach that destination where the things that are pleasant are the things that are honorable finally become, for you, the same.
-
The most onerous slavery is to be a slave to oneself.
-
Speech is the mirror of the mind.
-
It is bad to live for necessity; but there is no necessity to live in necessity.
-
If you expect the wise man to be as angry as the baseness of crimes requires, then he must not only be angry but go insane.
-
No emotion falls into dislike so readily as sorrow.
-
Who is everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.
-
No good thing is pleasant without friends to share it.
-
True joy is a serene and sober motion; and they are miserably out so that take laughing for rejoicing; the seat of it is within, and there is no cheerfulness like the resolutions of a brave mind.
-
We all sorely complain of the shortness of time, and yet have much more than we know what to do with. Our lives are either spent in doing nothing at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in doing nothing that we ought to do. We are always complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them.
-
The foremost art of Kings is the power to endure hatred.
-
He who does not want to die should not want to live. For life is tendered to us with the proviso of death. Life is the way to this destination.
-
Fire tries gold, misery tries brave men.
-
It is a proof of nobility of mind to despise injuries.
-
Just as so many rivers, so many showers of rain from above, so many medicinal springs do not alter the taste of the sea, so the pressure of adversity does not affect the mind of the brave man. For it maintains its balance, and over all that happens it throws its own complexion, because it is more powerful than external circumstances.
-
The mind, unless it is pure and holy, cannot see God.
-
The pleasures of the palate deal with us like Egyptian thieves who strangle those whom they embrace.
-
There is nothing that we can properly call our own but our time, and yet everybody fools us out of it who has a mind to do it. If a man borrows a paltry sum of money, there must needs be bonds and securities, and every common civility is presently charged upon account. But he who has my time thinks he owes me nothing for it, though it be a debt that gratitude itself can never repay.