A Quote by Seneca the Younger
No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.
Related Quotes
No man is more unhappy than the one who is never in adversity; the greatest affliction of life is never to be afflicted.
Existence alone had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more. Perhaps it was only from the force of his desires that he had regarded himself as a man to whom more was permitted than to others.
As a man of pleasure, by a vain attempt to be more happy than any man can be, is often more miserable than most men are, so the sceptic, in a vain attempt to be wise beyond what is permitted to man, plunges into a darkness more deplorable, and a blindness more incurable than that of the common herd, whom he despises, and would fain instruct.
Someone once said, 'Adversity introduces a man to himself.' For some reason, that's scary, but most people discover that adversity does make them stronger.
Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He was a good man, but he was hard on himself.
It is a most unhappy state to be at a distance with God: man needs no greater infelicity than to be left to himself.
[Winston Churchill] never spares himself in conversation. He gives himself so generously that hardly anyone else is permitted to give anything in his presence.
A man who has never lost himself in a cause bigger than himself has missed one of life's mountaintop experiences. Only in losing himself does he find himself. Only then does he discover all the latent strengths he never knew he had and which otherwise would have remained dormant.
A man is never more serious than when he praise himself.
The reason why great men meet with so little pity or attachment in adversity, would seem to be this: the friends of a great man were made by his fortune, his enemies by himself, and revenge is a much more punctual paymaster than gratitude.
The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.
I think Picasso was someone who took art's powers of consuming, its powers of much-ness and multiplicity, and used that to his fullest extent. That's something that was permitted to men, obviously, much more than women, but was also permitted in the past much more often than now.
I'm convinced, more than ever, that man finds liberation only when he binds himself to God and commits himself to his fellow man.
He found himself weeping. Not for the future or for the emperor. These were the tears of a man who saw before himself a masterpiece. True art was more than beauty; it was more than technique. It was not just imitation. It was boldness, it was contrast, it was subtlety.
A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.
The man who is meek is not even sensitive about himself. He is not always watching himself and his own interests. He is not always on the defensive… To be truly meek means we no longer protect ourselves, because we see there is nothing worth defending… The man who is truly meek never pities himself, he is never sorry for himself. He never talks to himself and says, “You are having a hard time, how unkind these people are not to understand you.
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