Seneca the Younger Quotes
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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 fate is inexorable, and not to be moved either with tears or reproaches, an excess of sorrow is as foolish as profuse laughter; while, on the other hand, not to mourn at all is insensibility.
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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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Reason wishes that the judgement it gives be just; anger wishes that the judgement it has given seem to be just.
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Who can hope for nothing, should despair for nothing.
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Retirement without literary amusements is death itself, and a living tomb.
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Those whom true love has held, it will go on holding.
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It is essential to make oneself used to putting up with a little. Even the wealthy and the well provided are continually met and frustrated by difficult times and situations. It is in no man's power to have whatever he wants; but he has it in his power not to wish for what he hasn't got, and cheerfully make the most of the things that do come his way.
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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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Who has more leisure than a worm?
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It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.
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There is nothing more despicable than an old man who has no other proof than his age to offer of his having lived long in the world.
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It's the admirer and the watcher who provoke us to all the inanities we commit.
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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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The point is, not how long you live, but how nobly you live.
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Trifling trouble find utterance; deeply felt pangs are silent.
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The declaration of love may come sooner than expected. Take time before you reciprocate as this may simply be a statement of what they expect from you.
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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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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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As the soil, however rich it may be, cannot be productive without cultivation, so the mind without culture can never produce good fruit
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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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A benefit is estimated according to the mind of the giver.
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Many men provoke others to overreach them by excessive suspicion; their extraordinary distrust in some sort justifies the deceit.
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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