Seneca The Younger

The greatest wealth is a poverty of desires.

On entering a temple we assume all signs of reverence. How much more reverent then should we be before the heavenly bodies, the stars, the very nature of God!

What difference does it make, after all, what your position in life is if you dislike it yourself?

Drunkenness is nothing but a self-induced state of insanity.

Every day, therefore, should be regulated as if it were the one that brings up the rear, the one that rounds out and completes our lives.

When one has lost a friend one's eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Tears, yes, there should be, but not lamentation.

Refuse to let the thought of death bother you: nothing is grim when we have escaped that fear.

Death: There's nothing bad about it at all except the thing that comes before it-the fear of it.

Philosophy takes as her aim the state of happiness...she shows us what are real and what are only apparent evils. She strips men's minds of empty thinking, bestows a greatness that is solid and administers a check to greatness where it is puffed up and all an empty show; she sees that we are left no doubt about the difference between what is great and what is bloated.

There is about wisdom a nobility and magnificence in the fact that she doesn't just fall to a person's lot, that each man owes her to his own efforts, that one doesn't go to anyone other than oneself to find her.

We should live as if we were in public view, and think, too, as if someone could peer into the inmost recesses of our hearts-which someone can!

Prudence and love cannot be mixed; you can end love, but never moderate it.

Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing.

You want to live-but do you know how to live? You are scared of dying-and, tell me, is the kind of life you lead really any different from being dead?

What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.

We become wiser by adversity; prosperity destroys our appreciation of the right." "True happiness is ... to enjoy the present" "It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.

To be feared is to fear. No one has been able to strike terror into others and at the same time enjoy peace of mind.

If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living.

It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.

The great blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach; but we shut our eyes, and, like people in the dark, we fall foul upon the very thing we search for, without finding it.

If you expect the wise man to be as angry as the baseness of crimes requires, then he must not only be angry but go insane.