Seneca the Younger Quotes
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It’s in the very trickery that it pleases me. But show me how the trick is done, and I have lost my interest therein.
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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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Go on and increase in valor, O boy! this is the path to immortality.
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Real improvement is of slow growth only.
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A crowd of fellow-sufferers is a miserable kind of comfort.
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For what else is Nature but God and the Divine Reason that pervades the whole universe and all its parts.
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Whoever has nothing to hope, let him despair of nothing.
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Hardly a man will you find who could live with his door open.
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Our minds must relax: they will rise better and keener after rest. Just as you must not force fertile farmland, as uninterrupted productivity will soon exhaust it, so constant effort will sap our mental vigour, while a short period of rest and relaxation will restore our powers. Unremitting effort leads to a kind of mental dullness and lethargy.
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The great pilot can sail even when his canvass is rent.
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There is nothing wrong with changing a plan when the situation has changed.
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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 I only have the will to be grateful, I am so.
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The part of life which we really live is short.
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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?
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Our posterity will wonder about our ignorance of things so plain.
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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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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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We deliberate about the parcels of life, but not about life itself, and so we arrive all unawares at its different epochs, and have the trouble of beginning all again. And so finally it is that we do not walk as men confidently towards death, but let death come suddenly upon us.
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If sensuality were happiness, beasts were happier than men; but human felicity is lodged in the soul, not in the flesh.
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Life is divided into three periods: that which has been, that which is, that which will be. Of these the present is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain.
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It is only the surprise and newness of the thing which makes that misfortune terrible which by premeditation might be made easy to us. For that which some people make light by sufferance, others do by foresight.
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You should rather suppose that those are involved in worthwhile duties who wish to have daily as their closest friends Zeno, Pythagoras, Democritus and all the other high priests of liberal studies, and Aristotle and Theophrastus. None of these will be too busy to see you, none of these will not send his visitor away happier and more devoted to himself, none of these will allow anyone to depart empty-handed. They are at home to all mortals by night and by day.
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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.