Seneca the Younger Quotes
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Misfortunes, in fine, cannot be avoided; but they may be sweetened, if not overcome, and our lives made happy by philosophy.
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The greatest power of ruling consists in the exercise of self-control.
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Hardly a man will you find who could live with his door open.
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A thing seriously pursued affords true enjoyment.
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The most imperious masters over their own servants are at the same time the most abject slaves to the servants of others.
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There is nothing the wise man does reluctantly.
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Know thyself; this is the great object.
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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.
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Nothing is so contemptible as the sentiments of the mob.
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A coward calls himself cautious, a miser thrifty.
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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
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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?
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He who seeks wisdom is a wise man; he who thinks he has found it is mad.
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He is greedy of life who is not willing to die when the world is perishing around him.
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Human nature is so constituted that insults sink deeper than kindnesses; the remembrance of the latter soon passes away, while that of the former is treasured in the memory.
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Dead, we become the lumber of the world, And to that mass of matter shall be swept Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept.
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Some laws, though unwritten, are more firmly established than all written laws.
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Indolence is stagnation; employment is life.
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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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Nullum ad nocendum tempus angustum est malis. No time is too short for the wicked to injure their neighbors.
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An old man at school is a contemptible and ridiculous object.
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Anger is like a ruin, which, in falling upon its victim, breaks itself to pieces.
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Those whom true love has held, it will go on holding.
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The rust of the mind is the destruction of genius.