Seneca the Younger Quotes
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A dwarf is small even if he stands on a mountain; a colossus keeps his height, even if he stands in a well.
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The greatest power of ruling consists in the exercise of self-control.
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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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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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No man is nobler born than another, unless he is born with better abilities and a more amiable disposition. They who make such a parade with their family pictures and pedigrees, are, properly speaking, rather to be called noted or notorious than noble persons. I thought it right to say this much, in order to repel the insolence of men who depend entirely upon chance and accidental circumstances for distinction, and not at all on public services and personal merit.
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A coward calls himself cautious, a miser thrifty.
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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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Abstinence is easier than temperance.
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Nothing is so contemptible as the sentiments of the mob.
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The man who has learned to triumph over sorrow wears his miseries as though they were sacred fillets upon his brow; and nothing is so entirely admirable as a man bravely wretched.
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He invites the commission of a crime who does not forbid it, when it is in his power to do so.
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The greatest chastisement that a man may receive who hath outraged another, is to have done the outrage; and there is no man who is so rudely punished as he that is subject to the whip of his own repentance.
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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.
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The chief bond of the soldier is his oath of allegiance and love for the flag.
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Those whom true love has held, it will go on holding.
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You are your choices.
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Some laws, though unwritten, are more firmly established than all written laws.
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Pain, scorned by yonder gout-ridden wretch, endured by yonder dyspeptic in the midst of his dainties, borne bravely by the girl in travail. Slight thou art, if I can bear thee, short thou art if I cannot bear thee!
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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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Conversation has a kind of charm about it, an insuating and insidious something that elicits secrets from us just like love or liquor.
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The mind is never right but when it is at peace within itself; the soul is in heaven even while it is in the flesh, if it be purged of its natural corruptions, and taken up with divine thoughts, and contemplations.
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Without an adversary prowess shrivels. We see how great and efficient it really is only when it shows by endurance what it is capable of.
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Anger, though concealed, is betrayed by the countenance. ?That anger is not warrantable which hath seen two suns.
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The ascent from earth to heaven is not easy.