We should every night call ourselves to an account: What infirmity have I mastered today? What passions opposed! What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired?
Seneca The ElderRead
The courts of kings are full of people, but empty of friends.
Interpretation
True friendship is rare in positions of power and authority.
Seneca the Elder highlights the emptiness of royal courts, suggesting that while they may be crowded with people seeking favor, genuine friendships are scarce. This reflects a philosophical viewpoint on the nature of relationships in environments where power dynamics overshadow authentic connections.
In practice
In a speech about networking in business, I may say, 'Remember, the courts of kings are full of people, but empty of friends.'
We should every night call ourselves to an account: What infirmity have I mastered today? What passions opposed! What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired?
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.
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.
The sun also shines on the wicked.
Let us be brave in the face of adversity.
What you think about yourself is much more important than what others think of you.
To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one's self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.
All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
Answer the big question of eternity, and the little questions of life fall into perspective.
History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy.
What we need in Africa is balanced development. Economic success cannot be a replacement for human rights or participation or democracy... it doesn't work.
Divinity is not something supernatural that ever and again invades the natural order in a crashing miracle. Divinity is not in some remote heaven, seated on a throne. Divinity is love. . . . Wherever goodness, beauty, truth, love, are-there is the divine.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.