Seneca Quotes

When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people.

Virtue depends partly upon training and partly upon practice; you must learn first, and then strengthen your learning by actions.

Forgive that you may be forgiven.

I am telling you to be a slow-speaking person.

What view is one likely to take of the state of a person's mind when his speech is wild and incoherent and knows no constraint?

Life is most delightful on the downward slope.

Retirement without the love of letters is a living burial.

No one is laughable who laughs at himself.

There's one blessing only, the source and cornerstone of beatitude: confidence in self.

The true felicity of life is to be free from anxieties and pertubations; to understand and do our duties to God and man, and to enjoy the present without any serious dependence on the future.

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.

If you want to be loved, love.

The conditions of conquest are always easy. We have but to toil awhile, endure awhile, believe always, and never turn back

Lay hold of today's task, and you will not depend so much upon tomorrow's.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment.

Whenever you hold a fellow creature in distress, remember that he is a man.

Great grief does not of itself put an end to itself.

Success is not greedy, as people think, but insignificant. That is why it satisfies nobody.

A person's fears are lighter when the danger is at hand.

It makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin.

Every reign must submit to a greater reign.

Believe me, that was a happy age, before the days of architects, before the days of builders.

Consult your friend on all things, especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment.

Fidelity purchased with money, money can destroy.

Courage is a scorner of things which inspire fear.

A great step toward independence is a good-humoured stomach.

A man can refrain from wanting what he has not and cheerfully make the best of a bird in the hand.

An age builds up cities: an hour destroys them.

What does reason demand of a man? A very easy thing-to live in accord with his own nature.

Men learn while they teach.

Nothing is ours except time.

If you don't know what port you are sailing to, no wind is favourable.

The articulate, trained voice is more distracting than mere noise.

Indolence is stagnation; employment is life.

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

It is easier to exclude harmful passions than to rule them, and to deny them admittance than to control them after they have been admitted.

It is the failing of youth not to be able to restrain its own violence.

A dwarf is small even if he stands on a mountain; a colossus keeps his height, even if he stands in a well.

Those who boast of their descent, brag on what they owe to others.

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.

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.

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.

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

However wretched a fellow-mortal may be, he is still a member of our common species.

The greater part of progress is the desire to progress.

You cannot, I repeat, successfully acquire it and preserve your modesty at the same time.

Courage leads starward, fear toward death.

Drunkenness is simply voluntary insanity.

Loyalty is the holiest good in the human heart.