Top 200 Seneca Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “The result may read more naturally in Latin than it ever could in English, but is none the less apt to leave the reader ‘dazzled and fatigued’.”

— Seneca

156. “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

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

— Seneca

159. “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

160. “But if you consider any man a friend whom you do not trust as you trust yourself, you are mightily mistaken and you do not sufficiently understand what true friendship means.”

— Seneca

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Seneca

166. “Retire into yourself as much as you can. Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those whom you are capable of improving.”

— Seneca

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

171. “For life should be provided with conspicuous illustrations. Let us not always be harking back to the dim past.”

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

173. “A plant which is often moved can never go strong.”

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

175. “You want to live – but do you know how to live? You are scared of dying – and, tell me, is the kind of life you lead really any different from being dead?”

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

177. “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

178. “Why then do we give our sons a liberal education? Not because it can make them morally good but because it prepares the mind for the acquisition of moral values.”

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

— Seneca

181. “Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for philosophy, they alone really live; for they are not content to be good guardians of their own lifetime only. They annex every age to their own; all the years that have gone before them are an addition to their own.”

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Seneca

188. “You are teaching cruelty to a person who cannot learn to be cruel.”

— Seneca

189. “To want to know more than is sufficient is a form of intemperance.”

— Seneca

190. “Life on such heights ends in a fall.”

— Seneca

191. “None of us goes deep below the surface. We skim the top only, and we regard the smattering of time spent in the search for wisdom as enough and to spare for a busy man.”

— Seneca

192. “See to it that nothing keeps you down.”

— Seneca

193. “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

194. “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

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. “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

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

— Seneca

198. “We do not put to the test those things which cause our fear; we do not examine into them; we blench and retreat just like soldiers who are forced to abandon their camp because of a dust-cloud raised by stampeding cattle, or are thrown into a panic by the spreading of some unauthenticated rumour.”

— Seneca

199. “Travelling doesn’t make a man a doctor or a public speaker: there isn’t a single art which is acquired merely by being in one place rather than another. Can wisdom, then, the greatest art of all, be picked up in the course of taking a trip? Take my word for it, the trip doesn’t exist that can set you beyond the reach of cravings, fits of temper, or fears.”

— Seneca

200. “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