Seneca the Younger Quotes
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Vice may be learnt, even without a teacher
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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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Necessity is stronger than duty.
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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.
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These individulas have riches just as we say that we 'have a fever,' when really the fever has us.
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You are your choices.
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The most happy ought to wish for death.
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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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Philosophy alone makes the mind invincible, and places us out of the reach of fortune, so that all her arrows fall short of us.
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Retirement without literary amusements is death itself, and a living tomb.
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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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Light cares speak, great ones are speechless.
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The philosopher: he alone knows how to live for himself. He is the one, in fact, who knows the fundamental thing: how to live.
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It is essential to make oneself used to putting up with a little. Even the wealthy and the well provided are continually met and frustrated by difficult times and situations. It is in no man's power to have whatever he wants; but he has it in his power not to wish for what he hasn't got, and cheerfully make the most of the things that do come his way.
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We should live as if we were in public view, and think, too, as if someone could peer into the inmost recesses of our hearts-which someone can!
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Prosperity asks for fidelity; adversity exacts it.
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True wisdom consists in not departing from nature and in molding our conduct according to her laws and model.
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No tree becomes rooted and sturdy unless many a wind assails it. For by its very tossing it tightens its grip and plants its roots more securely; the fragile trees are those that have grown in a sunny valley.
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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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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.
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There is the need for someone against which our characters can measure themselves. Without a ruler, you won't make the crooked straight.
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It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.
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It is the constant fault and inseparable evil quality of ambition, that it never looks behind it.
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The intellect must not be kept at consistent tension, but diverted by pastimes.... The mind must have relaxation, and will rise stronger and keener after recreation.