Seneca the Younger Quotes
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Know thyself; this is the great object.
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There is nothing the wise man does reluctantly.
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The greatest power of ruling consists in the exercise of self-control.
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Wealth is the slave of a wise man. The master of a fool.
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Hardly a man will you find who could live with his door open.
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Nothing is so contemptible as the sentiments of the mob.
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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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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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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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A thing seriously pursued affords true enjoyment.
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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 is greedy of life who is not willing to die when the world is perishing around him.
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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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Some laws, though unwritten, are more firmly established than all written laws.
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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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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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A coward calls himself cautious, a miser thrifty.
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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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The point is, not how long you live, but how nobly you live.
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An old man at school is a contemptible and ridiculous object.
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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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Greatness stands upon a precipice, and if prosperity carries a man never so little beyond his poise, it overbears and dashes him to pieces.
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Those whom true love has held, it will go on holding.
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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.