Top 200 Seneca Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “He lives badly who does not know how to die well.”

— Seneca

104. “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

105. “You must lay aside the burdens of the mind; until you do this, no place will satisfy you.”

— Seneca

106. “Virtue alone affords everlasting and peace-giving joy; even if some obstacle arise, it is but like an intervening cloud, which floats beneath the sun but never prevails against it. When will it be your lot to attain this joy? Thus far, you have indeed not been sluggish, but you must quicken your pace. Much toil remains; to confront it, you must yourself lavish all your waking hours, and all your efforts, if you wish the result to be accomplished.”

— Seneca

107. “Discuss the problem with Nature; she will tell you that she has created both day and night.”

— Seneca

108. “Real wealth is poverty adjusted to the law of Nature.”

— Seneca

109. “You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind. To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who spend their whole life travelling abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find hospitality but no real friendships.”

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

111. “Virtue is divided into two parts – into contemplation of truth, and conduct.”

— Seneca

112. “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

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

— Seneca

114. “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

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

— Seneca

116. “Speak, and live, in this way; see to it that nothing keeps you down.”

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

123. “Wisdom is the perfect good of the human mind; philosophy is the love of wisdom, and the endeavor to attain it.”

— Seneca

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who spends all his time on his own needs, who organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day. For what new pleasures can any hour now bring him? He has tried everything, and enjoyed everything to repletion.”

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

130. “Are you really going to tell me that philosophy taught the world to use keys and bolts on doors – which was surely nothing but a signal for greed?”

— Seneca

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “All the wealth and ingenuity of epigram and illustration does not prevent us from feeling that the sentences often simply ‘repeat the same thought, clothed in constantly different guises, over and over again’, as Fronto complained in the century following.”

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

137. “We who are recovering from a prolonged spiritual sickness are in the same condition as invalids who have been affected to such an extent by prolonged indisposition that they cannot once be taken out of doors without ill effects.”

— Seneca

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Seneca

141. “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

142. “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

143. “And so there is no reason for you to think that any man has lived long because he has grey hairs or wrinkles; he has not lived long – he has existed long.”

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

145. “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

146. “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

147. “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

148. “Our motto, as everyone knows, is to live in conformity with nature: it is quite contrary to nature to torture one’s body, to reject simple standards of cleanliness and make a point of being dirty, to adopt a diet that is not just plain but hideous and revolting.”

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

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

— Seneca