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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He who seeks wisdom is a wise man; he who thinks he has found it is mad.
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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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Who can hope for nothing, should despair for nothing.
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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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You roll my log, and I will roll yours.
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Wealth is the slave of a wise man. The master of a fool.
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Be silent as to services you have rendered, but speak of favours you have received.
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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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Nothing is so contemptible as the sentiments of the mob.
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An old man at school is a contemptible and ridiculous object.
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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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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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Life is divided into three periods: that which has been, that which is, that which will be. Of these the present is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain.
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He is ungrateful who denies that he has received a kindness which has been bestowed upon him; he is ungrateful who conceals it; he is ungrateful who makes no return for it; most ungrateful of all is he who forgets it.
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The kind of solace that arises from having company in misery is spiteful.
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Light cares cry out; the great ones still are dumb.
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In my own time there have been inventions of this sort, transparent windows tubes for diffusing warmth equally through all parts of a building short-hand, which has been carried to such a perfection that a writer can keep pace with the most rapid speaker. But the inventing of such things is drudgery for the lowest slaves; philosophy lies deeper. It is not her office to teach men how to use their hands. The object of her lessons is to form the soul.
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To the believers it is true. To the wise it is false. To the leaders it is useful.
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It's the admirer and the watcher who provoke us to all the inanities we commit.
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Anger is like a ruin, which, in falling upon its victim, breaks itself to pieces.
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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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A coward calls himself cautious, a miser thrifty.
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Diligence is a very great help even to a mediocre intelligence. -Diligentia maximum etiam mediocris ingeni subsidium