Top 995 Quotes & Sayings by Seneca the Younger - Page 11

Corporeal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.

Life is short and art is long.

Men practice war; beasts do not.

Philosophy does not regard pedigree, she received Plato not as a noble, but she made him one.

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

We ought not to confine ourselves either to writing or to reading; the one, continuous writing, will cast a gloom over our strength, and exhaust it; the other will make our strength flabby and watery. It is better to have recourse to them alternately, and to blend one with the other, so that the fruits of one's reading may be reduced to concrete form by the pen.

I don’t mind citing a bad author if the line is good.

The many speak highly of you, but have you really any grounds for satisfaction with yourself if you are the kind of person the many understand?

Light cares speak, great ones are speechless. -Curae leves loquuntur ingentes stupent

Man is a reasoning Animal.

Although a man has so well purged his mind that nothing can trouble or deceive him any more, yet he reached his present innocence through sin.

Conversation has a kind of charm about it, an insuating and insidious something that elicits secrets from us just like love or liquor.

Something that can never be learnt too thoroughly can never be said too often.

I do not sacrifice, but lend myself to business.

There is nothing after death, and death itself is nothing.

While you teach, you learn.

True love hates and will not bear delay.

Fate leads the willing, and drags along the reluctant.

Drunkenness is simply voluntary insanity.

There is no fair wind for one who knows not whither he is bound.

What if a man save my life with a draught that was prepared to poison me? The providence of the issue does not at all discharge the obliquity of the intent. And the same reason holds good even in religion itself. It is not the incense, or the offering that is acceptable to God, but the purity and devotion of the worshipper.

He that makes himself famous by his eloquence, justice or arms illustrates his extraction, let it be never so mean; and gives inestimable reputation to his parents. We should never have heard of Sophroniscus, but for his son, Socrates; nor of Ariosto and Gryllus, if it had not been for Xenophon and Plato.

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.

Those whom fortune has never favored are more joyful than those whom she has deserted.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

However wretched a fellow-mortal may be, he is still a member of our common species.

No book can be so good, as to be profitable when negligently read.

An age builds up cities: an hour destroys them.

Nullum ad nocendum tempus angustum est malis. No time is too short for the wicked to injure their neighbors.

The vices of idleness are only to be shaken off by active employment.

If you don't know what port you are sailing to, no wind is favourable.

Whom they have injured they also hate.

Whatever is to make us better and happy God has placed either openly before us or close to us.

Leave in concealment what has long been concealed.

I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one's decency, can be called clothes. ... Wretched flocks of maids labor so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife's body.

You cannot, I repeat, successfully acquire it and preserve your modesty at the same time.

Epicurus says, "gratitude is a virtue that has commonly profit annexed to it." And where is the virtue that has not? But still the virtue is to be valued for itself, and not for the profit that attends it.

Crime oft recoils upon the author's head.

Apples taste sweetest when they're going.

He sins not, who is not wilfully a sinner.

The mind does not easily unlearn what it has been long in learning.

A thousand approaches lie open to death.

You talk one way, you live another.

This is the difference between us Romans and the Etruscans: We believe that lightning is caused by clouds colliding, whereas they believe that clouds collide in order to create lightning. Since they attribute everything to gods, they are led to believe not that events have a meaning because they have happened, but that they happen in order to express a meaning.

People do not die - they kill themselves.

The highest duty and the highest proof of wisdom - that deed and word should be in accord.

We are more easily led part by part to an understanding of the whole. -Facilius per partes in cognitionem totius adducimur

Fate rules the affairs of men, with no recognizable order.

It is bad to live for necessity; but there is no necessity to live in necessity.

Nemo tam divos habuit faventes, Crastinum ut possit sibi polliceri. Nobody has ever found the gods so much his friends that he can promise himself another day.

A thing seriously pursued affords true enjoyment.

You roll my log, and I will roll yours.

Loyalty is the holiest good in the human heart.

There is no satisfaction in any good without a companion.

No choice maxims - we Stoics don't practice that kind of window dressing.

The real compensation of a right action is inherent in having performed it.

No man finds it difficult to return to nature except the man who has deserted nature.

Modesty once extinguished knows not how to return.

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

Those things which make the infernal regions terrible, the darkness, the prison, the river of flaming fire, the judgment seat, are all a fable, with which the poets amuse themselves, and by them agitate us with vain terrors.