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Who can hope for nothing, should despair for nothing.
Seneca the Younger -
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.
Seneca the Younger
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We have lost morals, justice, honor, piety and faith, and that sense of shame which, once lost, can never be restored.
Seneca the Younger -
These individulas have riches just as we say that we 'have a fever,' when really the fever has us.
Seneca the Younger -
There is the need for someone against which our characters can measure themselves. Without a ruler, you won't make the crooked straight.
Seneca the Younger -
Let him that hath done the good office conceal it; let him that received it disclose it.
Seneca the Younger -
As Lucretius says: 'Thus ever from himself doth each man flee.' But what does he gain if he does not escape from himself? He ever follows himself and weighs upon himself as his own most burdensome companion. And so we ought to understand that what we struggle with is the fault, not of the places, but of ourselves
Seneca the Younger -
He is greedy of life who is not willing to die when the world is perishing around him.
Seneca the Younger
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Be not dazzled by beauty, but look for those inward qualities which are lasting.
Seneca the Younger -
Abstinence is easier than temperance.
Seneca the Younger -
Greatness stands upon a precipice, and if prosperity carries a man never so little beyond his poise, it overbears and dashes him to pieces.
Seneca the Younger -
Prosperity asks for fidelity; adversity exacts it.
Seneca the Younger -
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.
Seneca the Younger -
Resistance to oppression is second nature.
Seneca the Younger
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When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity?
Seneca the Younger -
The ascent from earth to heaven is not easy.
Seneca the Younger -
Unblest is he who thinks himself unblest.
Seneca the Younger -
Those things which make the infernal regions terrible, the darkness, the prison, the river of flaming fire, the judgment seat, are all a fable, with which the poets amuse themselves, and by them agitate us with vain terrors.
Seneca the Younger -
A coward calls himself cautious, a miser thrifty.
Seneca the Younger -
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.
Seneca the Younger
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Vice may be learnt, even without a teacher
Seneca the Younger -
This life is only a prelude to eternity.
Seneca the Younger -
I will have a care of being a slave to myself, for it is a perpetual, a shameful, and the heaviest of all servitudes; and this may be done by moderate desires.
Seneca the Younger -
Many men provoke others to overreach them by excessive suspicion; their extraordinary distrust in some sort justifies the deceit.
Seneca the Younger