We should every night call ourselves to an account: What infirmity have I mastered today? What passions opposed! What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired?
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of self-reflection and accountability in personal growth.
Seneca the Elder encourages individuals to engage in nightly self-reflection, assessing their personal growth by evaluating the challenges they faced, the temptations they resisted, and the virtues they developed. This practice not only fosters self-awareness but also strengthens one's character and moral resolve, promoting continuous improvement in the pursuit of a virtuous life.
In practice
A mentor sharing this quote with mentees during a workshop on personal development.
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.
The courts of kings are full of people, but empty of friends.
What you think about yourself is much more important than what others think of you.
I like contradictions. We have never attained the infinite variety and contradictions that exist in nature. Tomorrow I shall contradict myself. That is the one way I have of asserting my liberty, the real liberty one does not find as a member of society.
I offered up a special prayer, a prayer which came with tears and anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor.
In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.
A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones
And the same things look bent and straight when seen in water and out of it, and also both concave and convex, due to the sight's being mislead by the colors, and every sort of confusion of this kind is plainly in our soul. And, then, it is because they take advantage of this affection in our nature that shadow painting, and puppeteering, and many other tricks of the kind fall nothing short of wizardry.
One has to have a complicated kind of optimism. You can't refuse to look at how horrible things are.
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