Seneca the Younger Quotes

I would rather be sick than idle.

Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk.

Death is sometimes a punishment, often a gift; to many it has been a favor.

Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed and rightly.

Men's language is as their lives.

The road by precepts is tedious, by example, short and efficacious.

Nothing is so bitter that a calm mind cannot find comfort in it.

Greatness stands upon a precipice, and if prosperity carries a man never so little beyond his poise, it overbears and dashes him to pieces.

He who does not want to die should not want to live. For life is tendered to us with the proviso of death. Life is the way to this destination.

Power exercised with violence has seldom been of long duration.

Fire tries gold, misery tries brave men.

Fortune's not content with knocking a man down; she sends him spinning head over heels, crash upon crash.

It's the admirer and the watcher who provoke us to all the inanities we commit.

What is more insane than to vent on senseless things the anger that is felt towards men?

Human nature is so constituted that insults sink deeper than kindnesses; the remembrance of the latter soon passes away, while that of the former is treasured in the memory.

Do everything as in the eye of another.

As long as we are among humans, let us be humane.

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.

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.

To want simply what is enough nowadays suggests to people primitiveness and squalor.

If you sit in judgment, investigate, if you sit in supreme power, sit in command.

Unjust dominion cannot be eternal.

We are wrong in looking forward to death: in great measure it's past already.

We pray for trifles without so much as a thought of the greatest blessings; and we are not ashamed many times, to ask God for that which we should blush to own to our neighbor.

Why do people not confess vices? It is because they have not yet laid them aside. It is a waking person only who can tell their dreams.

A consciousness of wrongdoing is the first step to salvation...you have to catch yourself doing it before you can correct it.

Virtue is that perfect good, which is the complement of a happy life; the only immortal thing that belongs to mortality.

A young man respects and looks up to his teachers.

Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.

What else is nature but God?

A good conscience fears no witness, but a guilty conscience is solicitous even in solitude. If we do nothing but what is honest, let all the world know it. But if otherwise, what does it signify to have nobody else know it, so long as I know it myself? Miserable is he who slights that witness.

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

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.

Everything hangs on one's thinking.

The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.

Go on and increase in valor, O boy! this is the path to immortality.

Let us cherish and love old age; for it is full of pleasure, if you know how to use it. The best morsel is reserved for last.

We are taught for the schoolroom, not for life.

If we desire to judge justly, we must persuade ourselves that none of us is without sin.

It is the constant fault and inseparable evil quality of ambition, that it never looks behind it.

Prosperity asks for fidelity; adversity exacts it.

He who is brave is free.

See what daily exercise does for one.

Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come . . . . Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate.

I shall never be ashamed to quote a bad author if what he says is good.

I do not sacrifice, but lend myself to business.

A benefit is estimated according to the mind of the giver.

Death takes us piecemeal, not at a gulp.