Seneca The Younger Quotes

If you are wise, You will mingle one thing with the other- Not hoping without doubt; Not doubting without hope.

Our words should aim not to please, but to help.

That which Fortune has not given, she cannot take away.

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

He shows a greater mind who does not restrain his laughter, than he who does not deny his tears.

The poor are not the people with less, which is less desirable

It is not poverty that we praise, it is the man whom poverty cannot humble or bend.

They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.

Whom the dawn sees proud, evening sees prostrate.

Familiarity reduces the greatness of things.

When one is friend on himself, also is friend of everybody.

Virtue needs a director and guide. Vice can be learned even without a teacher.

True love can fear no one.

He who receives a benefit with gratitude, repays the first installment of it.

The place one's in, though, doesn't make any contribution to peace of mind: it's the spirit that makes everything agreeable to oneself.

Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature.

Whereas a prolonged life is not necessarily better, a prolonged death is necessarily worse.

Where silence is not allowed, what then is permissible?

Let him who has given a favor be silent; let he who has received it tell it.

A great fortune is a great slavery.

But it is a pretty thing to see what money will do!

No one can be despised by another until he has learned to despise himself.

To be always fortunate, and to pass through life with a soul that has never known sorrow, is to be ignorant of one half of nature.

Who can hope for nothing, should despair for nothing.

Not he who has little, but he whose wishes more, is poor.

It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen that is the common right of humanity.

Drunkenness is nothing else but a voluntary madness.

Of war men ask the outcome, not the cause.

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.

It's a vice to trust all, and equally a vice to trust none.

The fear of war is worse than war itself.

The man who does something under orders is not unhappy; he is unhappy who does something against his will.

Prudence and love cannot be mixed; you can end love, but never moderate it.

How can a thing possibly govern others when it cannot be governed itself?

Let us fight the battle-retreat from the things that attract us and rouse ourselves to meet the things that actually attack us.

When one has lost a friend one's eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Tears, yes, there should be, but not lamentation.

Every day, therefore, should be regulated as if it were the one that brings up the rear, the one that rounds out and completes our lives.

Just where death is expecting you is something we cannot know; so, for your part, expect him everywhere.

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

Who has more leisure than a worm?

[During difficult times and after mistakes and failures it is helpful to remember ...] Oftentimes calamity turns to our advantage and great ruins make way for greater glories.

There is no benefit so large that malignity will not lessen it; none so narrow that a good interpretation will not enlarge it.

There is no power greater than true affection.

No crime has been without a precedent.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

While the fates permit, live happily; life speeds on with hurried step, and with winged days the wheel of the headlong year is turned.

Life is a play.It's not its length,but its performance that counts.

He that by harshness of nature rules his family with an iron hand is as truly a tyrant as he who misgoverns a nation.

All that lies betwixt the cradle and the grave is uncertain.

Vice is contagious, and there is no trusting the sound and the sick together.