Seneca the Younger Quotes
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If I only have the will to be grateful, I am so.
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Refrain from following the example of those whose craving is for attention, not their own improvement.
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The most happy ought to wish for death.
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To be feared is to fear. No one has been able to strike terror into others and at the same time enjoy peace of mind.
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No one can long hide behind a mask; the pretense soon lapses into the true character.
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When once ambition has passed its natural limits, its progress is boundless.
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Go on and increase in valor, O boy! this is the path to immortality.
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The book-keeping of benefits is simple: it is all expenditure; if any one returns it, that is clear gain; if he does not return it, it is not lost, I gave it for the sake of giving.
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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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Light cares speak, great ones are speechless.
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The hour which gives us life begins to take it away.
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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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Unblest is he who thinks himself unblest.
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Know thyself; this is the great object.
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When one is friend on himself, also is friend of everybody.
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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.
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It is only luxury and avarice that make poverty grievous to us; for it is a very small matter that does our business, and when we have provided against cold, hunger, and thirst, all the rest is but vanity and excess.
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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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No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.
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He grieves more than is necessary who grieves before any cause for sorrow has arisen.
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Life without literary studies is death.
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Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.
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It was the saying of a great man, that if we could trace our descents, we should find all slaves to come from princes, and all princes from slaves; and fortune has turned all things topsy-turvy in a long series of revolutions; beside, for a man to spend his life in pursuit of a title, that serves only when he dies to furnish out an epitaph, is below a wise man's business.
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Nullum ad nocendum tempus angustum est malis. No time is too short for the wicked to injure their neighbors.