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Successful crime is dignified with the name of virtue; the good become the slaves of the wicked; might makes right; fear silences the power of the law.
Seneca the Younger -
Go on and increase in valor, O boy! this is the path to immortality.
Seneca the Younger
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You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.
Seneca the Younger -
It is impossible to imagine anything which better becomes a ruler than mercy.
Seneca the Younger -
When once ambition has passed its natural limits, its progress is boundless.
Seneca the Younger -
Misfortune is the test of a person's merit.
Seneca the Younger -
I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one's decency, can be called clothes. ... Wretched flocks of maids labor so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife's body.
Seneca the Younger -
The hour which gives us life begins to take it away.
Seneca the Younger
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Money has never yet made anyone rich.
Seneca the Younger -
Fortune's not content with knocking a man down; she sends him spinning head over heels, crash upon crash.
Seneca the Younger -
We are at best but stewards of what we falsely call our own; yet avarice is so insatiable that it is not in the power of liberality to content it.
Seneca the Younger -
When thou hast profited so much that thou respectest even thyself, thou mayst let go thy tutor.
Seneca the Younger -
When one is friend on himself, also is friend of everybody.
Seneca the Younger -
The stomach begs and clamors, and listens to no precepts. And yet it is not an obdurate creditor; for it is dismissed with small payment if you give it only what you owe, and not as much as you can.
Seneca the Younger
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Life without literary studies is death.
Seneca the Younger -
There are many things akin to highest deity that are still obscure. Some may be too subtle for our powers of comprehension, others imperceptible to us because such exalted majesty conceals itself in the holiest part of its sanctuary, forbidding access to any power save that of the spirit. How many heavenly bodies revolve unseen by human eye!
Seneca the Younger -
He grieves more than is necessary who grieves before any cause for sorrow has arisen.
Seneca the Younger -
A large library is apt to distract rather than to instruct the learner; it is much better to be confined to a few authors than to wander at random over many.
Seneca the Younger -
The philosopher: he alone knows how to live for himself. He is the one, in fact, who knows the fundamental thing: how to live.
Seneca the Younger -
If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.
Seneca the Younger
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The man who spends his time choosing one resort after another in a hunt for peace and quiet will in every place he visits find something to prevent him from relaxing.
Seneca the Younger -
Who-only let him be a man and intent upon honor-is not eager for the honorable ordeal and prompt to assume perilous duties? To what energetic man is not idleness a punishment?
Seneca the Younger -
Philosophy alone makes the mind invincible, and places us out of the reach of fortune, so that all her arrows fall short of us.
Seneca the Younger -
Finally, everybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is preoccupied with many things-eloquence cannot, nor the liberal studies-since the mind, when distracted, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it. There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn.
Seneca the Younger