“It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”
— Seneca the Younger
“No wind blows in favor of a ship without direction.”
“While we are postponing, life speeds by.”
“What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.”
“You are your choices.”
“To rule yourself is the ultimate power.”
“While we teach, we learn.”
“No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.”
“If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”
“If you don’t know, ask. You will be a fool for the moment, but a wise man for the rest of your life.”
“It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness. As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.”
“Don’t stumble over something behind you.”
“The greatest wealth is a poverty of desires.”
“If you don’t know what port you are sailing to, no wind is favourable.”
“The important thing about a problem is not its solution, but the strength we gain in finding the solution.”
“Every journey has an end.”
“Time discovers truth.”
“Look at the stars lighting up the sky: no one of them stays in the same place.”
“To err is human. To repeat error is of the Devil.”
“God is near you, is with you, is inside you.”
“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?”
“When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.”
“Gold is tried by fire, brave men by adversity.”
“They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.”
“Fire proves gold, adversity proves men.”
“Many things have fallen only to rise higher.”
“Real improvement is of slow growth only.”
“No one can long hide behind a mask; the pretense soon lapses into the true character.”
“Chance makes a plaything of a man’s life.”
“Men learn while they teach.”
“Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.”
“Laugh at your problems; everybody else does.”
“You learn to know a pilot in a storm.”
“As long as we are among humans, let us be humane.”
“Greed’s worst point is its ingratitude.”
“The greatest power of ruling consists in the exercise of self-control.”
“Time discovers truth. Time heals what reason cannot.”
“A man’s as miserable as he thinks he is.”
“If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living.”
“We are always complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end to them.”
“Some lack the fickleness to live as they wish and just live as they have begun.”
“For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them.”
“The artist finds a greater pleasure in painting than in having completed the picture.”
“We should every night call ourselves to an account: What infirmity have I mastered today? What passions opposed? What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired? Our vices will abate of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.”
“A dwarf can stand on a mountain, he’s no taller.”
“One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.”
“There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality.”
“There is nothing in the world so much admired as a man who knows how to bear unhappiness with courage.”
“The fates lead the willing, and drag the unwilling.”
“What’s the good of dragging up sufferings which are over, of being unhappy now just because you were then.”
“He who is everywhere is nowhere.”
“Where fear is, happiness is not.”
“The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.”
“It is another’s fault if he be ungrateful, but it is mine if I do not give. To find one thankful man, I will oblige a great many that are not so.”
“It is part of the cure to wish to be cured.”
“It is better to have useless knowledge than to know nothing.”
“If you live according to nature, you never will be poor; if according to the world’s caprice, you will never be rich.”
“It is only luxury and avarice that make poverty grievous to us; for it is a very small matter that does our business, and when we have provided against cold, hunger, and thirst, all the rest is but vanity and excess.”
“The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.”
“Watch over yourself. Be your own accuser, then your judge; ask yourself grace sometimes, and, if there is need, impose upon yourself some pain.”
“We never reflect how pleasant it is to ask for nothing.”
“To the stars through difficulties.”
“To the person who does not know where he wants to go there is no favorable wind.”
“Make haste to live, and consider each day a life.”
“Great men rejoice in adversity, just as brave soldiers triumph in war.”
“The wise man will always reflect concerning the quality not the quantity of life.”
“He who would do great things should not attempt them all alone.”
“Loyalty is the holiest good in the human heart.”
“One hand washes the other.”
“Death takes us piecemeal, not at a gulp.”
“The man who spends his time choosing one resort after another in a hunt for peace and quiet will in every place he visits find something to prevent him from relaxing.”
“There is no evil that does not promise inducements. Avarice promises money; luxury, a varied assortment of pleasures; ambition, a purple robe and applause. Vices tempt you by the rewards they offer.”
“Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.”
“The true felicity of life is to be free from anxieties and pertubations; to understand and do our duties to God and man, and to enjoy the present without any serious dependence on the future.”
“For men in a state of freedom had thatch for their shelter, while slavery dwells beneath marble and gold.”
“Money has never yet made anyone rich.”
“I am like a book, with pages that have stuck together for want of use: my mind needs unpacking and the truths stored within must be turned over from time to time, to be ready when occasion demands.”
“Teach the art of living well.”
“The worse a person is the less he feels it.”
“The Fates guide those who go willingly. Those who do not, they drag.”
“Even after a bad harvest there must be sowing.”
“The shortest road to wealth lies in the contempt of wealth.”
“Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all. It sets the slave at liberty, carries the banished man home, and places all mortals on the same level, insomuch that life itself were a punishment without it.”
“The way to good conduct is never too late.”
“There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living; there is nothing harder to learn.”
“Everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.”
“Man is a reasoning Animal.”
“Love of action is not industry.”
“Life is the fire that burns and the sun that gives light. Life is the wind and the rain and the thunder in the sky. Life is matter and is earth, what is and what is not, and what beyond is in Eternity.”
“These individulas have riches just as we say that we ‘have a fever,’ when really the fever has us.”
“Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing.”
“As the soil, however rich it may be, cannot be productive without cultivation, so the mind without culture can never produce good fruit.”
“Not he who has little, but he whose wishes more, is poor.”
“Voyage, travel, and change of place impart vigor.”
“It is extreme evil to depart from the company of the living before you die.”
“He that does good to another does good also to himself, not only in the consequence but in the very act. For the consciousness of well-doing is in itself ample reward.”
“Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.”
“He who has great power should use it lightly.”
“Greatness stands upon a precipice, and if prosperity carries a man never so little beyond his poise, it overbears and dashes him to pieces.”
“Nothing is ours except time.”
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