Seneca the Younger Quotes
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Light cares cry out; the great ones still are dumb.
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It's the admirer and the watcher who provoke us to all the inanities we commit.
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This life is only a prelude to eternity.
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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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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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There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living; there is nothing harder to learn.
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The most imperious masters over their own servants are at the same time the most abject slaves to the servants of others.
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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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No one can be despised by another until he has learned to despise himself.
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He that by harshness of nature rules his family with an iron hand is as truly a tyrant as he who misgoverns a nation.
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Solitude and company may be allowed to take their turns: the one creates in us the love of mankind, the other that of ourselves; solitude relieves us when we are sick of company, and conversation when we are weary of being alone, so that the one cures the other. There is no man so miserable as he that is at a loss how to use his time
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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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It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and - even more surprising - it takes the whole of life to learn how to die.
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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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The sovereign good of man is a mind that subjects all things to itself and is itself subject to nothing; such a man's pleasures are modest and reserved, and it may be a question whether he goes to heaven, or heaven comes to him; for a good man is influenced by God Himself, and has a kind of divinity within him.
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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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Trifling trouble find utterance; deeply felt pangs are silent.
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The world itself is too small for the covetous.
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Nothing is so contemptible as the sentiments of the mob.
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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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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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An old man at school is a contemptible and ridiculous object.
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He who has fostered the sweet poison of love by fondling it, finds it too late to refuse the yoke which he has of his own accord assumed.
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Philosophy is the art and law of life, and it teaches us what to do in all cases, and, like good marksmen, to hit the white at any distance.