Seneca the Younger Quotes
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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.
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To be enslaved to oneself is the heaviest of all servitudes.
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The true felicity of life is to be free from anxieties and pertubations; to understand and do our duties to God and man, and to enjoy the present without any serious dependence on the future.
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The way to good conduct is never too late.
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It is better to have useless knowledge than to know nothing.
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Who is everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.
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The pleasures of the palate deal with us like Egyptian thieves who strangle those whom they embrace.
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Full of men, vacant of friends.
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It is bad to live for necessity; but there is no necessity to live in necessity.
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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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A favor is to a grateful man delightful always; to an ungrateful man only once.
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Shall I tell you what philosophy holds out to humanity? Counsel...You are called in to help the unhappy.
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All things are cause for either laughter or weeping.
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Let tears flow of their own accord; their flowing is not inconsistent with inward peace and harmony.
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No good thing is pleasant without friends to share it.
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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.
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The friends of the unfortunate live a long way off.
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Death is a release from and an end of all pains.
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Men love their vices and hate them at the same time.
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A good conscience fears no witness, but a guilty conscience is solicitous even in solitude. If we do nothing but what is honest, let all the world know it. But if otherwise, what does it signify to have nobody else know it, so long as I know it myself? Miserable is he who slights that witness.
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Life is a gift of the immortal Gods, but living well is the gift of philosophy.
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Time is the greatest remedy for anger.
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No one's so old that he mayn't with decency hope for one more day.
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Philosophy's power to blunt all the blows of circumstance is beyond belief.