Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Roman writer Seneca the Elder.
Last updated on November 8, 2024.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Elder, also known as Seneca the Rhetorician, was a Roman writer, born of a wealthy equestrian family of Corduba, Hispania. He wrote a collection of reminiscences about the Roman schools of rhetoric, six books of which are extant in a more or less complete state and five others in epitome only. His principal work, a history of Roman affairs from the beginning of the Civil Wars until the last years of his life, is almost entirely lost to posterity. Seneca lived through the reigns of three significant emperors; Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula. He was the father of Lucius Junius Gallio Annaeanus, best known as a Proconsul of Achaia; his second son was the dramatist and Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger (Lucius), who was tutor of Nero, and his third son, Marcus Annaeus Mela, became the father of the poet Lucan.
We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.
Know this, that he that is a friend to himself, is a friend to all men.
We should every night call ourselves to an account: What infirmity have I mastered today? What passions opposed! What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired?
You can end love more easily than you can moderate it.
It is not manly to turn one's back on fortune.
Fortune reveres the brave, and overwhelms the cowardly.
The road to learning by precept is long, but by example short and effective.
Failure changes for the better, success for the worse.
What you think about yourself is much more important than what others think of you.
The courts of kings are full of people, but empty of friends.
If a man does not know what port he is steering for, no wind is favorable to him.
The conditions of conquest are always easy. We have but to toil awhile, endure awhile, believe always, and never turn back
The sun also shines on the wicked.
What is the proper limit for wealth? It is, first, to have what is necessary; and, second, to have what is enough.
The great soul surrenders itself to fate.
Courage leads starward, fear toward death.
True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing.
It is wrong not to give a hand to the fallen. This right is common to the whole human race.
It is a great thing to know the season for speech and the season for silence.
He who looks for advantage out of friendship strips it all of its nobility.
Unhappy is the man, though he rule the world, who doesn't consider himself supremely blessed.
If you wish to fear nothing, consider that everything is to be feared.
There's some end at last for the man who follows a path; mere rambling is interminable.
Courage is a scorner of things which inspire fear.
No man will swim ashore and take his baggage with him.
Add each day something to fortify you against poverty and death.
All art is an imitation of nature.
No one is better born than another, unless they are born with better abilities and a more amiable disposition.
Malice drinks one-half of its own poison.
It is the sign of a great mind to dislike greatness, and prefer things in measure to things in excess.
Let us be brave in the face of adversity.
Unhappy is the man, though he rule the world, who doesn't consider himself supremely blessed. In order to consider himself supremely blessed he must deeply understand that things could be much worse but aren't! To not do that is to always be less happy than he could be.
Nothing is our except time.
No evil is without its compensation ... it is not the loss itself, but the estimate of the loss, that troubles us.
It is not death we fear, but the thought of it.
For the great benefits of our being- our life, health, and reason-we look upon ourselves.
It is for the superfluous things of life that men sweat.