Seneca the Younger Quotes
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A good person dyes events with his own color . . . and turns whatever happens to his own benefit.
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No one loves his country for its size or eminence, but because it's his own.
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Necessity is stronger than duty.
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There is nothing the wise man does reluctantly.
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It is the characteristic of a weak and diseased mind to fear the unfamiliar.
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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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It is only the surprise and newness of the thing which makes that misfortune terrible which by premeditation might be made easy to us. For that which some people make light by sufferance, others do by foresight.
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Abstinence is easier than temperance.
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A thing seriously pursued affords true enjoyment.
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Epicurus says, "gratitude is a virtue that has commonly profit annexed to it." And where is the virtue that has not? But still the virtue is to be valued for itself, and not for the profit that attends it.
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You roll my log, and I will roll yours.
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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 point is, not how long you live, but how nobly you live.
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Chance makes a plaything of a man's life.
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Anyone can stop a man's life, but no one his death; a thousand doors open on to it.
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The kind of solace that arises from having company in misery is spiteful.
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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.
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The great thing is to know when to speak and when to keep quiet.
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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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A coward calls himself cautious, a miser thrifty.
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Those whom true love has held, it will go on holding.
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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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It is safer to offend certain men than it is to oblige them; for as proof that they owe nothing they seek recourse in hatred.
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Wealth is the slave of a wise man. The master of a fool.