Top 200 Seneca Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 5

101. “We must give up many things to which we are addicted, considering them to be good. Otherwise, courage will vanish, which should continually test itself.”

— Seneca

102. “Joy is the goal which you desire to reach, but you are wandering from the path, if you expect to reach your goal while you are in the midst of riches and official titles – in other words, if you seek joy in the midst of cares, these objects for which you strive so eagerly, as if they would give you happiness and pleasure, are merely causes of grief.”

— Seneca

103. “It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the one who hankers after more. What difference does it make how much there is laid away in a man’s safe or in his barns, how many head of stock he grazes or how much capital he puts out at interest, if he is always after what is another’s and only counts what he has yet to get, never what he has already. You ask what is the proper limit to a person’s wealth? First, having what is essential, and second, what is enough.”

— Seneca

104. “We let ourselves drift with every breeze; we are frightened at uncertainties, just as if they were certain.”

— Seneca

105. “After a shipwreck, sailors try the sea again. The banker is not frightened away from the forum by the swindler. If one were compelled to drop everything that caused trouble, life would soon grow dull amid sluggish idleness;.”

— Seneca

106. “We are in the habit of saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents who were allotted to us, that they were given to us by chance. But we can choose whose children we would like to be. There are households of the noblest intellects: choose the one into which you wish to be adopted, and you will inherit not only their name but their property too.”

— Seneca

107. “But those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear for the future have a life that is very brief and troubled; when they have reached the end of it, the poor wretches perceive too late that for such a long while they have been busied in doing nothing.”

— Seneca

108. “There is a sequence about the creative process, and a work of genius is a synthesis of its individual features from which nothing can be subtracted without disaster.”

— Seneca

109. “Philosophy calls for plain living, but not for penance; and we may perfectly well be plain and neat at the same time. This is the mean of which I approve; our life should observe a happy medium between the ways of a sage and the ways of the world at large; all men should admire it, but they should understand it also. “Well.”

— Seneca

110. “A balanced combination of the two attitudes is what we want; the active man should be able to take things easily, while the man who is inclined towards repose should be capable of action. Ask nature: she will tell you that she made both day and night.”

— Seneca

111. “You ask what is the proper limit to a person’s wealth? First, having what is essential, and second, having what is enough.”

— Seneca

112. “Virtue depends partly upon training and partly upon practice; you must learn first, and then strengthen your learning by action.”

— Seneca

113. “It is too easy to side with the majority.”

— Seneca

114. “No man was ever wise by chance” “Associate.”

— Seneca

115. “Most of my converse is with books.”

— Seneca

116. “When the strength of wine has become too great and has gained control over the mind, every lurking evil comes forth from its hiding-place.”

— Seneca

117. “That which is enough is ready to our hands.”

— Seneca

118. “Do you think that the man has any thought of mending his ways who counts over his vices as if they were virtues? Therefore, as far as possible, prove yourself guilty, hunt up charges against yourself; play the part, first of accuser, then of judge, last of intercessor. At times be harsh with yourself. Farewell.”

— Seneca

119. “We should strive, not to live long, but to live rightly;.”

— Seneca

120. “How many have laid waste to your life when you weren’t aware of what you were losing, how much was wasted in pointless grief, foolish joy, greedy desire, and social amusements – how little of your own was left to you. You will realize you are dying before your time!”

— Seneca

121. “You’re like ordinary mortals in fearing everything, you’re like immortals in coveting everything.”

— Seneca

122. “For nature does not give a man virtue: the process of becoming a good man is an art.”

— Seneca

123. “Homo res sacra homini.”

— Seneca

124. “What is the state of things, then? It is this: I do not regard a man as poor, if the little which remains is enough for him. I advise you, however, to keep what is really yours; and you cannot begin too early. For, as our ancestors believed, it is too late to spare when you reach the dregs of the cask. Of that which remains at the bottom, the amount is slight, and the quality is vile.”

— Seneca

125. “The thought for today is one which I discovered in Epicurus; for I am wont to cross over even into the enemy’s camp – not as a deserter, but as a scout. He says: “Contented poverty is an honourable estate.” Indeed, if it be contented, it is not poverty at all. It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.”

— Seneca

126. “Life is neither a Good nor an Evil; it is simply the place where good and evil exist.”

— Seneca

127. “It is inevitable that life will be not just very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil. They achieve what they want laboriously; they possess what they have achieved anxiously; and meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return. New preoccupations take the place of the old, hope excites more hope and ambition more ambition. They do not look for an end to their misery, but simply change the reason for it.”

— Seneca

128. “It’s only when you’re breathing your last that the way you’ve spent your time will become apparent, “I accept the terms, and feel no dread of the coming judgment.”

— Seneca

129. “He is a great man who uses earthenware dishes as if they were silver; but he is equally great who uses silver as if it were earthenware. It is the sign of an unstable mind not to be able to endure riches.”

— Seneca

130. “Let us be brave in the face of hazards. Let us not fear wrongs, or wounds, or bonds, or poverty. And what is death? It is either the end, or a process of change.”

— Seneca

131. “We are born for it, but not with it. And even in the best of people, until you cultivate it there is only the material for virtue, not virtue itself.”

— Seneca

132. “What could be more foolish than a man’s being afraid of people’s words? My friend Demetrius has a nice way of putting things when he says, as he commonly does, that to him the utterances of the unenlightened are as noises emanating from the belly. ‘What difference does it make to me,’ he asks, ’whether their rumblings come from their upper or their nether regions?”

— Seneca

133. “Life is divided into three periods, past, present and future. Of these, the present is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain. For this last is the one over which Fortune has lost her power, which cannot be brought back to anyone’s control. But this is what preoccupied people lose: for they have no time to look back at their past, and even if they did, it is not pleasant to recall activities they are ashamed of.”

— Seneca

134. “The religious hunger of the masses of his day was to be met not by philosophy but by the cults of Isis and Mithras and Christianity.”

— Seneca

135. “Misfortune has a way of choosing some unprecedented means or other of impressing its power on those who might be said to have forgotten it.”

— Seneca

136. “Live with Chrysippus, live with Posidonius; they will give you a knowledge of man and the universe; they will tell you to be a practical philosopher: not just to entertain your listeners to a clever display of language, but to steel your spirit and brace it against whatever threatens.”

— Seneca

137. “At last, then, away with all these treacherous goods! They look better to those who hope for them than to those who have attained them.”

— Seneca

138. “Limiting one’s desires actually helps to cure one of fear. ‘Cease to hope,’ he says, ’and you will cease to fear.”

— Seneca

139. “I would not venture as yet to assure you, or even to hope, that there is nothing left in me needing to be changed.”

— Seneca

140. “No one is to be found who is willing to distribute his money, yet among how many does each one of us distribute his life!”

— Seneca

141. “This ideal figure seemed, from the way the Stoic lecturers talked, to have somehow become perfect in some sudden transformation long ago; gradual self-improvement was hardly discussed.”

— Seneca

142. “We men torment ourselves over that which is to come as well as over that which is past... The present alone can make no man wretched.”

— Seneca

143. “No man ought to glory except in that which is his own.”

— Seneca

144. “Zeno of Elea has dismissed all such difficulties by introducing another; he declares that nothing exists.”

— Seneca

145. “We should not believe the lack of silver and gold to be proof of the simple life.”

— Seneca

146. “Good men are mutually helpful; for each gives practice to the other’s virtues and thus maintains wisdom at its proper level. Each needs someone with whom he may make comparisons and investigations.”

— Seneca

147. “I do not know any person with whom I should prefer you to associate rather than yourself.”

— Seneca

148. “Each man has a character of his own choosing; it is chance or fate that decides his choice of job.”

— Seneca

149. “No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it, or believes that living through many consulships is a great blessing.”

— Seneca

150. “It is indeed foolish to be unhappy now because you may be unhappy at some future time.”

— Seneca