Seneca the Younger Quotes
-
He invites the commission of a crime who does not forbid it, when it is in his power to do so.
-
A good person dyes events with his own color . . . and turns whatever happens to his own benefit.
-
Misfortunes, in fine, cannot be avoided; but they may be sweetened, if not overcome, and our lives made happy by philosophy.
-
The final hour when we cease to exist does not itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way.
-
Many men provoke others to overreach them by excessive suspicion; their extraordinary distrust in some sort justifies the deceit.
-
Let wickedness escape as it may at the bar, it never fails of doing justice upon itself; for every guilty person is his own hangman.
-
Those whom true love has held, it will go on holding.
-
The point is, not how long you live, but how nobly you live.
-
A thing seriously pursued affords true enjoyment.
-
It is the characteristic of a weak and diseased mind to fear the unfamiliar.
-
If ever you come upon a grove of ancient trees which have grown to an exceptional height, shutting out a view of sky by a veil of pleached and intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest, the seclusion of the spot and your marvel at the thick unbroken shade in the midst of the open spaces, will prove to you the presence of deity.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Our posterity will wonder about our ignorance of things so plain.
-
There is nothing the wise man does reluctantly.
-
The most imperious masters over their own servants are at the same time the most abject slaves to the servants of others.
-
We have lost morals, justice, honor, piety and faith, and that sense of shame which, once lost, can never be restored.
-
No one loves his country for its size or eminence, but because it's his own.
-
Upon occasion we should go as far as intoxication.... Drink washes cares away, stirs the mind from its lowest depths.... But in liberty moderation is wholesome, and so it is in wine.... We ought not indulge too often, for fear the mind contract a bad habit, yet it is right to draw it toward elation and release and to banish dull sobriety for a little.
-
Freedom is not being a slave to any circumstance, to any constraint, to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on equal terms.
-
A dwarf is small even if he stands on a mountain; a colossus keeps his height, even if he stands in a well.
-
This life is only a prelude to eternity.
-
Abstinence is easier than temperance.
-
You roll my log, and I will roll yours.