Seneca the Younger Quotes
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While the fates permit, live happily; life speeds on with hurried step, and with winged days the wheel of the headlong year is turned.
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Desultory reading is delightful, but to be beneficial, our reading must be carefully directed.
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Go on and increase in valor, O boy! this is the path to immortality.
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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.
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When thou hast profited so much that thou respectest even thyself, thou mayst let go thy tutor.
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When once ambition has passed its natural limits, its progress is boundless.
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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.
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There is nothing wrong with changing a plan when the situation has changed.
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Nothing is more disgraceful than that an old man should have nothing to show to prove that he has lived long, except his years.
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Democracy is more cruel than wars or tyrants.
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Life without literary studies is death.
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It is impossible to imagine anything which better becomes a ruler than mercy.
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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.
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If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.
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The hour which gives us life begins to take it away.
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He grieves more than is necessary who grieves before any cause for sorrow has arisen.
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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.
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Necessity is stronger than duty.
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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.
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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.
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Unblest is he who thinks himself unblest.
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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!
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It is never too late to turn from the errors of our ways: He who repents of his sins is almost innocent.
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Happy is the man who can endure the highest and lowest fortune. He who has endured such vicissitudes with equanimity has deprived misfortune of its power.