Top 500 Seneca the Younger Quotes (2023 Update)
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451. “The greatest man is he who chooses right with the most invincible resolution.”

— Seneca the Younger

452. “You roll my log, and I will roll yours.”

— Seneca the Younger

453. “Apples taste sweetest when they’re going.”

— Seneca the Younger

454. “It is proof of a bad cause when it is applauded by the mob.”

— Seneca the Younger

455. “No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to.”

— Seneca the Younger

456. “The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.”

— Seneca the Younger

457. “Sadness usually results from one of the following causes either when a man does not succeed, or is ashamed of his success.”

— Seneca the Younger

458. “Plato once wanted to punish one of his slaves and asked his nephew to do the actual whipping for he himself did not own his anger.”

— Seneca the Younger

459. “The voice of flattery affects us after it has ceased, just as after a concert men find some agreeable air ringing in their ears to the exclusion of all serious business.”

— Seneca the Younger

460. “Misfortune is the test of a person’s merit.”

— Seneca the Younger

461. “Virtue is shut out from no one; she is open to all, accepts all, invites all, gentlemen, freedmen, slaves, kings, and exiles; she selects neither house nor fortune; she is satisfied with a human being without adjuncts.”

— Seneca the Younger

462. “It is the characteristic of a weak and diseased mind to fear the unfamiliar.”

— Seneca the Younger

463. “Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.”

— Seneca the Younger

464. “It is sweet to mingle tears with tears; Griefs, where they wound in solitude, Wound more deeply.”

— Seneca the Younger

465. “Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.”

— Seneca the Younger

466. “Retirement without the love of letters is a living burial.”

— Seneca the Younger

467. “It is not poverty that we praise, it is the man whom poverty cannot humble or bend.”

— Seneca the Younger

468. “All that lies betwixt the cradle and the grave is uncertain.”

— Seneca the Younger

469. “The mind is a matter over every kind of fortune; itself acts in both ways, being the cause of its own happiness and misery.”

— Seneca the Younger

470. “Let us fight the battle-retreat from the things that attract us and rouse ourselves to meet the things that actually attack us.”

— Seneca the Younger

471. “Constant exposure to dangers will breed contempt for them.”

— Seneca the Younger

472. “The great pilot can sail even when his canvass is rent.”

— Seneca the Younger

473. “Forgive that you may be forgiven.”

— Seneca the Younger

474. “Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.”

— Seneca the Younger

475. “A lesson that is never learned can never be too often taught.”

— Seneca the Younger

476. “We are born to lose and to perish, to hope and to fear, to vex ourselves and others; and there is no antidote against a common calamity but virtue; for the foundation of true joy is in the conscience.”

— Seneca the Younger

477. “There are a few men whom slavery holds fast, but there are many more who hold fast to slavery.”

— Seneca the Younger

478. “We learn not for life but for the debating-room.”

— Seneca the Younger

479. “Life’s neither a good nor an evil: it’s a field for good and evil.”

— Seneca the Younger

480. “What you do for an ungrateful man is thrown away.”

— Seneca the Younger

481. “Dignity increases more easily than it begins.”

— Seneca the Younger

482. “Pain, scorned by yonder gout-ridden wretch, endured by yonder dyspeptic in the midst of his dainties, borne bravely by the girl in travail. Slight thou art, if I can bear thee, short thou art if I cannot bear thee!”

— Seneca the Younger

483. “To be able to endure odium is the first art to be learned by those who aspire to power.”

— Seneca the Younger

484. “The kind of solace that arises from having company in misery is spiteful.”

— Seneca the Younger

485. “Virtue with some is nothing but successful temerity.”

— Seneca the Younger

486. “What narrow innocence it is for one to be good only according to the law.”

— Seneca the Younger

487. “He who dreads hostility too much is unfit to rule.”

— Seneca the Younger

488. “Where silence is not allowed, what then is permissible?”

— Seneca the Younger

489. “Men trust rather to their eyes than to their ears; the effect of precepts is therefore slow and tedious, whilst that of examples is summary and effectual.”

— Seneca the Younger

490. “Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.”

— Seneca the Younger

491. “A great step toward independence is a good-humoured stomach.”

— Seneca the Younger

492. “He who has fostered the sweet poison of love by fondling it, finds it too late to refuse the yoke which he has of his own accord assumed.”

— Seneca the Younger

493. “Nothing is void of God, his work is everywhere his full of himself.”

— Seneca the Younger

494. “A well-governed appetite is a great part of liberty.”

— Seneca the Younger

495. “The first step in a person’s salvation is knowledge of their sin.”

— Seneca the Younger

496. “Every reign must submit to a greater reign.”

— Seneca the Younger

497. “Death either destroys or unhusks us. If it means liberation, better things await us when our burden s gone: if destruction, nothing at all awaits us; blessings and curses are abolished.”

— Seneca the Younger

498. “The mind is never right but when it is at peace within itself.”

— Seneca the Younger

499. “Everyone rushes his life on, and suffers from a yearning for the future and a boredom with the present. But that man who devotes every hour to his own needs, who plans every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears tomorrow.”

— Seneca the Younger

500. “Such is the blindness, nay the insanity of mankind, that some men are driven to death by the fear of it.”

— Seneca the Younger