Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.
Seneca The YoungerRead
What nature requires is obtainable, and within easy reach. It is for the superfluous we sweat.
Interpretation
Nature's needs are simple and accessible, while our efforts often go towards unnecessary things.
This quote from Seneca highlights the distinction between our essential needs, which are often straightforward and easily met, and the excessive desires that lead us to work harder than necessary. It suggests that much of our stress and effort is spent pursuing superfluous goals rather than focusing on what truly matters in life.
In practice
In a discussion about work-life balance, this quote could emphasize the importance of focusing on what is truly necessary.
Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.
No tree becomes rooted and sturdy unless many a wind assails it. For by its very tossing it tightens its grip and plants its roots more securely; the fragile trees are those that have grown in a sunny valley.
Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.
To be able to endure odium is the first art to be learned by those who aspire to power.
Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.
Loyalty is the holiest good in the human heart.
It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced.
Respect for the rights of others means peace.
Within this arena, which grows more stable night after day, generations work and love and hope and vanish. New generations tread on the corpses of their fathers, continue the work above the abyss and struggle to tame the dread mystery. How? By cultivating a single field, by kissing a woman, by studying a stone, an animal, an idea.
The body is a multilingual being. It speaks through its color and its temperature, the flush of recognition, the glow of love, the ash of pain, the heat of arousal, the coldness of nonconviction. . . . It speaks through the leaping of the heart, the falling of the spirits, the pit at the center, and rising hope.
'Which is stronger, politics or love?' is like asking, 'Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling?' They are two sides of the same thing.
The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.
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