Seneca The Younger Quotes

If thou wishest to get rid of thy evil propensities, thou must keep far from evil companions.

Drunkenness does not create vice; it merely brings it into view.

There is the need for someone against which our characters can measure themselves. Without a ruler, you won't make the crooked straight.

The first and greatest punishment of the sinner is the conscience of sin.

Light troubles speak; the weighty are struck dumb.

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.

No man ever became wise by chance.

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.

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.

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

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.

The gladiator is formulating his plan in the arena or essentially Too late.

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

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

It is not the man who has little, but he who desires more, that is poor.

The mind is a matter over every kind of fortune; itself acts in both ways, being the cause of its own happiness and misery.

He who repents of having sinned is almost innocent.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Be harsh with yourself at times.

Behold a contest worthy of a god, a brave man matched in conflict with adversity.

Luck never made a man wise.

The chief bond of the soldier is his oath of allegiance and love for the flag.

No one should feel pride in anything that is not his own.

Nothing is void of God, his work is everywhere his full of himself.

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

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

Drunkenness is nothing but a self-induced state of insanity.

See what daily exercise does for one.

He that visits the sick in hopes of a legacy, but is never so friendly in all other cases, I look upon him as being no better than a raven that watches a weak sheep only to peck out its eyes.

No man is free who is a slave to the flesh.

How many discoveries are reserved for the ages to come when our memory shall be no more, for this world of ours contains matter for investigation for all generations.

I was not born for one corner. The whole world is my native land.

Do not ask for what you will wish you had not got.

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

Consider, when you are enraged at any one, what you would probably think if he should die during the dispute.

If you judge, investigate.

That grief is light which can take counsel.

There is no genius free from some tincture of madness

No action will be considered blameless, unless the will was so, for by the will the act was dictated.

The best ideas are common property.

Four things does a reckless man gain who covets his neighbor's wife - demerit, an uncomfortable bed, thirdly, punishment, and lastly, hell.

He that does good to another does good also to himself.

The acquisition of riches has been to many not an end to their miseries, but a change in them: The fault is not in the riches, but the disposition.

Let wickedness escape as it may at the bar, it never fails of doing justice upon itself; for every guilty person is his own hangman.

He who boasts of his descent, praises the deed of another.

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

He who would arrive at the appointed end must follow a single road and not wander through many ways.

... frugality makes a poor man rich.

It is a world of mischief that may be done by a single example of avarice or luxury. One voluptuous palate makes many more.

Time is the greatest remedy for anger.