Seneca the Younger Quotes

A coward calls himself cautious, a miser thrifty.

You should keep on learning as long as there is something you do not know.

I am not born from a single place. My country is the whole world.

There is no evil that does not offer inducements. Vices tempt you by the rewards which they offer.

Who is everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.

Authority founded on injustice is never of long duration.

Lightning will wreck its displeasures not only upon pillars, trees, and sheep, but upon altars and temples, and let the sacrilegious go free.

Adversity finds at last the man whom she has often passed by.

If God adds another day to our life, let us receive it gladly.

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.

Nothing is more honorable than a grateful heart.

The point is, not how long you live, but how nobly you live.

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

The intellect must not be kept at consistent tension, but diverted by pastimes.... The mind must have relaxation, and will rise stronger and keener after recreation.

Some there are that torment themselves afresh with the memory of what is past; others, again, afflict themselves with the apprehension of evils to come; and very ridiculously both - for the one does not now concern us, and the other not yet ... One should count each day as a separate life.

The comfort of having a friend may be taken away, but not that of having had one.

All things are cause for either laughter or weeping.

Virtue is shut out from no one; she is open to all, accepts all, invites all, gentlemen, freedmen, slaves, kings, and exiles; she selects neither house nor fortune; she is satisfied with a human being without adjuncts.

No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

Indolence is stagnation; employment is life.

Every change of place becomes a delight.

Let me therefore live as if every moment were to be my last.

As the mother's womb holds us for ten months, making us ready, not for the womb itself, but for life, just so, through our lives, we are making ourselves ready for another birth...Therefore look forward without fear to that appointed hour- the last hour of the body, but not of the soul...That day, which you fear as being the end of all things, is the birthday of your eternity.

Light cares speak, great ones are speechless. -Curae leves loquuntur ingentes stupent

Our (the Stoic) motto, as you know, is live according to nature.

The condition of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but most wretched is the condition of those who labor at preoccupations that are not even their own, who regulate their sleep by that of another, their walk by the pace of another, who are under orders in case of the freest things in the world-loving and hating. If these wish to know how short their life is, let them reflect how small a part of it is their own.

Death falls heavily on that man who, known too well to others, dies in ignorance of himself.

There is nothing after death, and death itself is nothing.

Just as I shall select my ship when I am about to go on a voyage, or my house when I propose to take a residence, so shall I choose my death when I am about to depart from life.

That comes too late that comes for the asking.

One who's our friend is fond of us; one who's fond of us isn't necessarily our friend.

No man esteems anything that comes to him by chance; but when it is governed by reason, it brings credit both to the giver and receiver; whereas those favors are in some sort scandalous that make a man ashamed of his patron.

As was his language so was his life.

There is as much greatness of mind in acknowledging a good turn, as in doing it.

Do not grudge your brother his rest. He has at last become free, safe and immortal, and ranges joyous through the boundless heavens; he has left this low-lying region and has soared upwards to that place which receives in its happy bosom the souls set free from the chains of matter. Your brother has not lost the light of day, but has obtained a more enduring light. He has not left us, but has gone on before.

There is no easy way from the earth to the stars.

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.

It is dishonorable to say one thing and think another; how much more dishonorable to write one thing and think another.

There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living; there is nothing harder to learn.

The shortest road to wealth lies in the contempt of wealth.

Retirement without the love of letters is a living burial.

A hated government does not long survive.

The willing, destiny guides them; the unwilling, destiny drags them.

Do what you should, not what you may.

To forgive all is as inhuman as to forgive none

For greed, all nature is too little.

Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than to much cunning.