Seneca the Younger Quotes
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No one loves his country for its size or eminence, but because it's his own.
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Who can hope for nothing, should despair for nothing.
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It is the characteristic of a weak and diseased mind to fear the unfamiliar.
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We have lost morals, justice, honor, piety and faith, and that sense of shame which, once lost, can never be restored.
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A thing seriously pursued affords true enjoyment.
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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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You should rather suppose that those are involved in worthwhile duties who wish to have daily as their closest friends Zeno, Pythagoras, Democritus and all the other high priests of liberal studies, and Aristotle and Theophrastus. None of these will be too busy to see you, none of these will not send his visitor away happier and more devoted to himself, none of these will allow anyone to depart empty-handed. They are at home to all mortals by night and by day.
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Abstinence is easier than temperance.
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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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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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Necessity is stronger than duty.
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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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You roll my log, and I will roll yours.
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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 point is, not how long you live, but how nobly you live.
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Nothing is so contemptible as the sentiments of the mob.
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Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardship of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.
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It's the admirer and the watcher who provoke us to all the inanities we commit.
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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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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 who seeks wisdom is a wise man; he who thinks he has found it is mad.
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Diligence is a very great help even to a mediocre intelligence. -Diligentia maximum etiam mediocris ingeni subsidium
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The kind of solace that arises from having company in misery is spiteful.