Top 200 Seneca Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 5

151. “Bion’s dictum, that all the activities of men are like their beginnings, and their life is not more high-souled or serious than their conception, and that being born from nothing they are reduced to nothing.”

— Seneca

152. “Omnes feriunt, ultima necat.”

— Seneca

153. “Nature’s wants are slight; the demands of opinion are boundless.”

— Seneca

154. “Otherwise we shall repel and alienate the very people whose reform we desire; we shall make them, moreover, reluctant to imitate us in anything for fear they may have to imitate us in everything.”

— Seneca

155. “Do not, however, deem yourself truly happy until you find that you can live before men’s eyes, until your walls protect but do not hide you; although we are apt to believe that these walls surround us, not to enable us to live more safely, but that we may sin more secretly. 4.”

— Seneca

156. “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

157. “Having in mind not how bravely I was capable of dying but how far from bravely he was capable of bearing the loss, I commanded myself to live. There are times when even to live is an act of bravery.”

— Seneca

158. “So – to the best of your ability – demonstrate your own guilt, conduct inquiries of your own into all the evidence against yourself. Play the part first of prosecutor, then of judge and finally of pleader in mitigation. Be harsh with yourself at times.”

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

160. “Each man, according to his lot in life, is stultified by flattery. We should say to him who flatters us: “You call me a man of sense, but I understand how many of the things which I crave are useless, and how many of the things which I desire will do me harm. I have not even the knowledge, which satiety teaches to animals, of what should be the measure of my food or my drink. I do not yet know how much I can hold.”

— Seneca

161. “Inwardly everything should be different but our outward face should conform with the crowd.”

— Seneca

162. “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

163. “Consider individuals, survey men in general; there is none whose life does not look forward to the morrow. “What harm is there in this,” you ask? Infinite harm; for such persons do not live, but are preparing to live. They postpone everything. Even if we paid strict attention, life would soon get ahead of us; but as we are now, life finds us lingering and passes us by as if it belonged to another, and though it ends on the final day, it perishes every day.”

— Seneca

164. “For by no wisdom can natural weakness of the body be removed. That which is implanted and inborn can be toned down by training, but not overcome.”

— Seneca

165. “Similarly, people who never relax and people who are invariably in a relaxed state merit your disapproval – the former as much as the latter.”

— Seneca

166. “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

167. “Move to better company: live with the Catos, with Laelius, with Tubero. If you like Greek company too, attach yourself to Socrates and Zeno: the one would teach you how to the should it be forced upon you, the other how to the before it is forced upon you.”

— Seneca

168. “It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, – the superfluous things that wear our togas threadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores. That which is enough is ready to our hands. He.”

— Seneca

169. “No man has ever been so far advanced by Fortune that she did not threaten him as greatly as she had previously indulged him.”

— Seneca

170. “Everyone goes out of life just as if he had but lately entered it.” Take anyone off his guard, young, old, or middle-aged; you will find that all are equally afraid of death, and equally ignorant of life. No one has anything finished, because we have kept putting off into the future all our undertakings.”

— Seneca

171. “To Seneca, as Letter XC and other letters plainly show, the philosopher and the wise man were the same person.”

— Seneca

172. “For wisdom does not lie in books. Wisdom publishes not words but truths – and I’m not sure that the memory isn’t more reliable when it has no external aids to fall back on.”

— Seneca

173. “Hope and fear, dissimilar as they are, keep step together; fear follows hope.”

— Seneca

174. “A person who starts being friends with you because it pays him will similarly cease to be friends because it pays him to do so.”

— Seneca

175. “Is it not madness and the worst form of derangement to want so much though you can hold so little? Therefore, though you may increase your income and extend your estates, you will never increase the capacity of your bodies.”

— Seneca

176. “I say that all men hide their sins, and, even though the issue be successful, enjoy the results while concealing the sins themselves.”

— Seneca

177. “I know of no one with whom I should be willing to have you shared.”

— Seneca

178. “More active and commendable still is the person who is waiting for the daylight and intercepts the first rays of the sun; shame on him who lies in bed dozing when the sun is high in the sky, whose waking hours commence in the middle of the day.”

— Seneca

179. “We were born into a world in which things were ready to our hands; it is we who have made everything difficult to come by through our own disdain for what is easily come by.”

— Seneca

180. “In protecting their wealth men are tight-fisted, but when it comes to the matter of time, in the case of the one thing in which it is wise to be parsimonious, they are actually generous to a fault.”

— Seneca

181. “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

182. “The laws of Zaleucus and Charondas are still admired.”

— Seneca

183. “Regard him as loyal, and you will make him loyal.”

— Seneca

184. “What then? Shall I not follow in the footsteps of my predecessors? I shall indeed use the old road, but if I find one that makes a shorter cut and is smoother to travel, I shall open the new road. Men who have made these discoveries before us are not our masters, but our guides. Truth lies open for all; it has not yet been monopolized. And there is plenty of it left even for posterity to discover.”

— Seneca

185. “Suppose he has a beautiful home and a handsome collection of servants, a lot of land under cultivation and a lot of money out at interest; not one of these things can be said to be in him – they are just things around him. Praise in him what can neither be given nor snatched away, what is peculiarly a man’s.”

— Seneca

186. “Though by means of reason he can lead a life which will not bring regrets, yet there resides in this imperfect creature, man, a certain power that makes for badness, because he possesses a mind which is easily moved to perversity.”

— Seneca

187. “When she created us, nature endowed us with noble aspirations, and just as she gave certain animals ferocity, others timidity, others cunning, so to us she gave a spirit of exalted ambition, a spirit that takes us in search of a life of, not the greatest safety, but the greatest honour – a spirit very like the universe, which, so far as mortal footsteps may, it follows and adopts as a model.”

— Seneca

188. “Finally, it is generally agreed that no activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied – not rhetoric or liberal studies – since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, to speak, crammed into it.”

— Seneca

189. “We need to set our affections on some good man and keep him constantly before our eyes, so that we may live as if he were watching us and do everything as if he saw what we were doing.”

— Seneca

190. “But travel won’t make a better or saner man of you. For this we must spend time in study and in the writings of wise men, to learn the truths that have emerged from their researches, and carry on the search ourselves for the answers that have not yet been discovered.”

— Seneca

191. “Those who wish their virtue to be advertised are not striving for virtue but for renown.”

— Seneca

192. “The ‘teaching’ is generously eclectic; the first thirty letters each contain some quotation from or reference to writings of the main rival philosophical school, the Epicureans.”

— Seneca

193. “We are born with a sense of the pleasantness of friendship just as of other things.”

— Seneca

194. “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

195. “What then do you think the effect will be on character, when the world at large assaults it? You must either imitate or loathe the world.”

— Seneca

196. “His tremendous faith in philosophy as a mistress was grounded on a belief that her end was the practical one of curing souls, of bringing peace and order to the feverish minds of men pursuing the wrong aims in life.”

— Seneca

197. “How closely flattery resembles friendship! It not only apes friendship, but outdoes it, passing it in the race; with wide-open and indulgent ears it is welcomed and sinks to the depths of the heart, and it is pleasing precisely wherein it does harm.”

— Seneca

198. “There are no fixed rules of style.’45.”

— Seneca

199. “We, too, are lit and put out. We suffer somewhat in the intervening period, but at either end of it there is a deep tranquillity. For, unless I’m mistaken, we are wrong, my dear Lucilius, in holding that death follows after, when in fact it precedes as well as succeeds. Death is all that was before us. What does it matter, after all, whether you cease to be or never begin, when the result of either is that you do not exist?”

— Seneca

200. “Finding wealth an intolerable burden is the mark of an unstable mind.”

— Seneca