Top 100 Seneca The Younger Quotes
#1. What madness it is for a man to starve himself to enrich his heir, and so turn a friend into an enemy! For his joy at your death will be proportioned to what you leave him.
Seneca The Younger
#2. 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.
Seneca The Younger
#3. On him does death lie heavily, who, but too well known to all, dies to himself unknown.
Seneca The Younger
#8. No one loves his country for its size or eminence, but because it's his own.
Seneca The Younger
#10. Take away ambition and vanity, and where will be your heroes and patriots?
Seneca The Younger
#11. One who's our friend is fond of us; one who's fond of us isn't necessarily our friend.
Seneca The Younger
#12. It is impossible to imagine anything which better becomes a ruler than mercy.
Seneca The Younger
#13. Nemo tam divos habuit faventes,
Crastinum ut possit sibi polliceri.
Nobody has ever found the gods so much his friends that he can promise himself another day.
Seneca The Younger
#14. It is never too late to turn from the errors of our ways: He who repents of his sins is almost innocent.
Seneca The Younger
#16. To be feared is to fear. No one has been able to strike terror into others and at the same time enjoy peace of mind.
Seneca The Younger
#17. There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
Seneca The Younger
#18. People pay the doctor for his trouble; for his kindness they still remain in his debt.
Seneca The Younger
#19. What narrow innocence it is for one to be good only according to the law.
Seneca The Younger
#21. Happy is the man who can endure the highest and lowest fortune. He who has endured such vicissitudes with equanimity has deprived misfortune of its power.
Seneca The Younger
#22. Those that are a friend to themselves are sure to be a friend to all.
Seneca The Younger
#23. Nature has made us passive, and to suffer is our lot. While we are in the flesh every man has his chain and his clog; only it is looser and lighter to one man than to another, and he is more at ease who takes it up and carries it than he who drags it.
Seneca The Younger
#24. Rehearse death. To say this is to tell a person to rehearse his freedom. A person who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. He is above, or at any rate, beyond the reach of, all political powers.
Seneca The Younger
#25. Who shrinks from knowledge of his calamities but aggravates his fear; troubles half seen, shall torture all the more.
Seneca The Younger
#26. The state of that man's mind who feels too intense an interest as to future events, must be most deplorable.
Seneca The Younger
#29. All we see and admire today will burn in the universal fire that ushers in a new, just, happy world.
Seneca The Younger
#30. The deep waters of time will flow over us: only a few men of genius will lift a head above the surface, and though doomed eventually to pass into the same silence, will fight against oblivion and for a long time hold their own.
Seneca The Younger
#31. The mind is a matter over every kind of fortune; itself acts in both ways, being the cause of its own happiness and misery.
Seneca The Younger
#33. Let us ask what is best - not what is customary. Let us love temperance - let us be just - let us refrain from bloodshed.
Seneca The Younger
#37. No man is born wise; but wisdom and virtue require a tutor; though we can easily learn to be vicious without a master.
Seneca The Younger
#38. Humanity is fortunate, because no man is unhappy except by his own fault.
Seneca The Younger
#40. The soul has this proof of divinity: that divine things delight it.
Seneca The Younger
#42. He is greedy of life who is not willing to die when the world is perishing around him.
Seneca The Younger
#44. That poverty is no disaster is understood by everyone who has not yet succumbed to the madness of greed and luxury that turns everything topsy-turvy.
Seneca The Younger
#46. You cannot, I repeat, successfully acquire it and preserve your modesty at the same time.
Seneca The Younger
#52. It is the constant fault and inseparable evil quality of ambition, that it never looks behind it.
Seneca The Younger
#54. 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.
Seneca The Younger
#56. Retire into yourself as much as possible. Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those whom you are capable of improving. The process is a mutual one. People learn as they teach.
Seneca The Younger
#62. Freedom is not being a slave to any circumstance, to any constraint, to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on equal terms.
Seneca The Younger
#64. 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.
Seneca The Younger
#66. You find in some a sort of graceless modesty, that makes them ashamed to requite an obligation.
Seneca The Younger
#68. There is no evil that does not offer inducements. Vices tempt you by the rewards which they offer.
Seneca The Younger
#69. Nothing is so false as human life, nothing so treacherous. God knows no one would have accepted it as a gift, if it had not been given without our knowledge.
Seneca The Younger
#70. A consciousness of wrongdoing is the first step to salvation ... you have to catch yourself doing it before you can correct it.
Seneca The Younger
#72. It is the property of a great and good mind to covet, not the fruit of good deeds, but good deeds themselves, and to seek for a good man even after having met with bad men.
Seneca The Younger
#74. Nullum ad nocendum tempus angustum est malis.
No time is too short for the wicked to injure their neighbors.
Seneca The Younger
#75. We sought therefore to amend our will, and not to suffer it through despite to languish long time in error.
Seneca The Younger
#76. To see a man fearless in dangers, untainted with lusts, happy in adversity, composed in a tumult, and laughing at all those things which are generally either coveted or feared, all men must acknowledge that this can be from nothing else but a beam of divinity that influences a mortal body.
Seneca The Younger
#77. As the soil, however rich it may be, cannot be productive without cultivation, so the mind without culture can never produce good fruit
Seneca The Younger
#82. Life is a play.It's not its length,but its performance that counts.
Seneca The Younger
#84. It's the great soul that surrenders itself to fate, but a puny degenerate thing that struggles.
Seneca The Younger
#85. The Best sign of Wisdom is the consistency between the words and deeds ...
Seneca The Younger
#87. There is the need for someone against which our characters can measure themselves. Without a ruler, you won't make the crooked straight.
Seneca The Younger
#89. Nothing is more disgraceful than that an old man should have nothing to show to prove that he has lived long, except his years.
Seneca The Younger
#90. There is this blessing, that while life has but one entrance, it has exits innumerable, and as I choose the house in which I live, the ship in which I will sail, so will I choose the time and manner of my death.
Seneca The Younger
#93. He who would arrive at the appointed end must follow a single road and not wander through many ways.
Seneca The Younger
#94. The origin of all mankind was the same; it is only a clear and good conscience that makes a man noble, for that is derived from heaven itself.
Seneca The Younger
#97. Money does all things for reward. Some are pious and honest as long as they thrive upon it, but if the devil himself gives better wages, they soon change their party.
Seneca The Younger
#98. Success gives the character of honesty to some classes of wickedness.
Seneca The Younger
#99. Prudence and love cannot be mixed; you can end love, but never moderate it.
Seneca The Younger
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