Seneca the Younger Quotes

What narrow innocence it is for one to be good only according to the law.

The man who spends his time choosing one resort after another in a hunt for peace and quiet will in every place he visits find something to prevent him from relaxing.

We are so vain as to set the highest value upon those things to which nature has assigned the lowest place. What can be more coarse and rude in the mind than the precious metals, or more slavish and dirty than the people that dig and work them? And yet they defile our minds more than our bodies, and make the possessor fouler than the artificer of them. Rich men, in fine, are only the greater slaves.

A man's as miserable as he thinks he is.

Poverty with joy isn't poverty at all. The poor man is not one who has little, but one who hankers after more.

He who would arrive at the appointed end must follow a single road and not wander through many ways.

Eternal law has arranged nothing better than this, that it has given us one way in to life, but many ways out.

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.

Nothing is more disgraceful than that an old man should have nothing to show to prove that he has lived long, except his years.

Love of action is not industry.

Eyes will not see when the heart wishes them to be blind.

Persistent kindness conquers the ill-disposed.

There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality.

The time will come when diligent research over periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden...Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memories of us will have been effaced. Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has something for every age to investigate. nature does not reveal her mysteries once and for all.

Epileptics know by signs when attacks are imminent and take precautions accordingly; we must do the same in regard to anger

Behold a contest worthy of a god, a brave man matched in conflict with adversity.

The fearful face usually betrays great guilt.

While we wait for life, life passes

Fear drives the wretched to prayer

It is rash to condemn where you are ignorant.

Live for thy neighbor if thou wouldst live for thyself.

God has not revealed all things to man and has entrusted us with but a fragment of His mighty work. But He who directs all things, who has established and laid the foundation of the world, who has clothed Himself with Creation, He is greater and better than that which He has wrought. Hidden from our eyes, He can only be reached by the spirit.

The things that are essential are acquired with little bother; it is the luxuries that call for toil and effort.

Great is he who enjoys his earthenware as if it were plate, and not less great is the man to whom all his plate is no more that earthenware.

No action will be considered blameless, unless the will was so, for by the will the act was dictated.

Many men would have arrived at wisdom had they not believed themselves to have arrived there already.

Nothing is as certain as that the vices of leisure are gotten rid of by being busy.

Our life's a moment and less than a moment, but even this mite nature has mockingly humored with some appearance of a longer span.

It is not the man who has little, but he who desires more, that is poor.

I will govern my life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one and read the other, for what does it signify to make anything a secret to my neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of our hearts, all our privacies are open?

That which is given with pride and ostentation is rather an ambition than a bounty.

The bounty of nature is too little for the greedy person.

There is more heroism in self-denial than in deeds of arms.

Some lack the fickleness to live as they wish and just live as they have begun.

A foolishness is inflicted with a hatred of itself.

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim.

Unblest is he who thinks himself unblest.

We should conduct ourselves not as if we ought to live for the body, but as if we could not live without it.

Whatever is well said by another, is mine.

Whom the dawn sees proud, evening sees prostrate.

If you expect the wise man to be as angry as the baseness of crimes requires, then he must not only be angry but go insane.

Speech devoted to truth should be straightforward and plain

What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.

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.

It is medicine, not scenery, for which a sick man must go searching.

Only a great man, believe me, and one whose excellence rises far above human failings, will not allow anything to be stolen from his own span of time, and his life is very long precisely because he has devoted to himself entirely any time that became available. None of it lay uncultivated and idle, none was under another man's control, for guarding it most jealously, he found nothing worth exchanging for his own precious time.

A crowd of fellow-sufferers is a miserable kind of comfort.

The mind makes the nobleman, and uplifts the lowly to high degree.