Seneca the Younger Quotes
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Virtue depends partly upon training and partly upon practice; you must learn first, and then strengthen your learning by action. If this be true, not only do the doctrines of wisdom help us but the precepts also, which check and banish our emotions by a sort of official decree.
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There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
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We are born subjects, and to obey God is perfect liberty. He that does this shall be free, safe and happy.
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Man's ideal state is realized when he has fulfilled the purpose for which he is born. And what is it that reason demands of him? Something very easy-that he live in accordance with his own nature.
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Let not the enjoyment of pleasures now within your grasp, be carried to such excess as to incapacitate you from future repetition.
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The mind that is anxious about future events is miserable.
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Our plans miscarry because they have no aim.
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Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than to much cunning.
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It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness. As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
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Religion worships God, while superstition profanes that worship.
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The man who can be compelled knows not how to die.
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It is one thing to remember, another to know. To remember is to safeguard something entrusted to the memory. But to know is to make each thing one's own, not depend on the text and always to look back to the teacher. "Zeno said this, Cleanthes said this." Let there be space between you and the book.
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Some lack the fickleness to live as they wish and just live as they have begun.
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Who shrinks from knowledge of his calamities but aggravates his fear; troubles half seen, shall torture all the more.
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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.
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War I abhor, and yet how sweet The sound along the marching street Of drum and fife, and I forget Wet eyes of widows, and forget Broken old mothers, and the whole Dark butchery without a soul.
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Light griefs do speak, while sorrow's tongue is bound.
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The place one's in, though, doesn't make any contribution to peace of mind: it's the spirit that makes everything agreeable to oneself.
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It is within the power of every man to live his life nobly, but of no man to live forever. Yet so many of us hope that life will go on forever, and so few aspire to live nobly.
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This is the reason we cannot complain of life: it keeps no one against his will.
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Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness it is to be expecting evil before it comes.
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I am not born from a single place. My country is the whole world.
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A good mind possesses a kingdom.
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Life's neither a good nor an evil: it's a field for good and evil.