Top 200 Seneca Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “The good man should go on living as long as he ought to, not just as long as he likes. The man who does not value his wife or a friend highly enough to stay on a little longer in life, who persists in dying in spite of them, is a thoroughly self-indulgent character.”

— Seneca

202. “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

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

— Seneca

204. “These we should refuse to buy, if we were compelled to give in payment for them our houses or some attractive and profitable estate; but we are eager to attain them at the cost of anxiety, of danger, and of lost honour, personal freedom, and time; so true it is that each man regards nothing as cheaper than himself.”

— Seneca

205. “Is it really so pleasant to die in harness? That is the feeling of many people: their desire for their work outlasts their ability to do it. They fight against their own bodily weakness, and they regard old age as a hardship on no other grounds than that it puts them on the shelf. The law does not make a man a soldier after fifty or a senator after sixty: men find it more difficult to gain leisure from themselves than from the.”

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “Tranquility can’t be grasped except by those who have reached an unwavering and firm power of judgment – the rest constantly fall and rise in their decisions, wavering in a state of alternately rejecting and accepting things. What is the cause of this back and forth? It’s because nothing is clear and they rely on the most uncertain guide – common opinion.”

— Seneca

212. “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

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

— Seneca

214. “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

215. “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

216. “It is a question whether he died by his own hand; for he fell from a sudden wound received in his groin, some doubting whether his death was voluntary, no one, whether it was timely. It.”

— Seneca

217. “In the ashes all men are levelled.”

— Seneca

218. “Then he was carried into a vapourbath, where he suffocated. His cremation was without ceremony, in accordance with his own instructions about his death – written at the height of his wealth and power.”

— Seneca

219. “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

220. “Notwithstanding his own condemnation42 of people who give less attention to what they have to say than to how they will say it, he is a signal example of a writer to whom form mattered as much as content.”

— Seneca

221. “The target it set seemed too high for ordinary men. It stifled and repressed ordinary human emotions in striving after apatheia, immunity to feeling; Cato, the great Stoic saint, is reported to have expressed regret at having kissed his wife in a moment of danger.”

— Seneca

222. “The law does not make a man a soldier after fifty or a senator after sixty: men find it more difficult to gain leisure from themselves than from the law. Meanwhile, as they rob and are robbed, as they disturb each other’s peace, as they make each other miserable, their lives pass without satisfaction, without pleasure, without mental improvement.”

— Seneca

223. “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

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

— Seneca

225. “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

226. “Others are snatched from sight; we ourselves are being stealthily filched away from ourselves.”

— Seneca

227. “Altogether the impression it conveyed, for all its idealism and sincerity, could be cold, dogmatic and unrealistic. Seneca’s contribution to ancient philosophy lay in the humanization of this creed, continuing a process begun long before in Rhodes and Rome by Panaetius and Posidonius.”

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

229. “Now there is great pleasure, not only in maintaining old and established friendships, but also in beginning and acquiring new ones.”

— Seneca

230. “This is what I mean: crimes can be well guarded; free from anxiety they cannot be.”

— Seneca

231. “They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning, after they have acquired them; but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity, – time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay.”

— Seneca