Seneca The Younger

When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people.

Light troubles speak; the weighty are struck dumb.

Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk.

This is the reason we cannot complain of life: it keeps no one against his will.

The place one's in, though, doesn't make any contribution to peace of mind: it's the spirit that makes everything agreeable to oneself.

A man is as unhappy as he has convinced himself he is.

What nature requires is obtainable, and within easy reach. It is for the superfluous we sweat.

To see a man fearless in dangers, untainted with lusts, happy in adversity, composed in a tumult, and laughing at all those things which are generally either coveted or feared, all men must acknowledge that this can be from nothing else but a beam of divinity that influences a mortal body.

That which is given with pride and ostentation is rather an ambition than a bounty.

You learn to know a pilot in a storm.

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

Consider, when you are enraged at any one, what you would probably think if he should die during the dispute.

No untroubled day has ever dawned for me.

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

With parsimony a little is sufficient; without it nothing is sufficient; but frugality makes a poor man rich.

A good conscience fears no witness, but a guilty conscience is solicitous even in solitude. If we do nothing but what is honest, let all the world know it. But if otherwise, what does it signify to have nobody else know it, so long as I know it myself? Miserable is he who slights that witness.

Leisure without literature is death, or rather the burial of a living man -Otium sine litteris mors est et hominis vivi sepultura

Let us say what we feel, and feel what we say; let speech harmonize with life.

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.

A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the study of so vast a subject. A time will come when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them.