Seneca
Cues
Showing 20 of 36 cues
“Excellence withers without an adversary. It is not what you endure that matters, but how you endure it.”
“For sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”
“If you apply yourself to study you will avoid all boredom with life, you will not long for night because you are sick of daylight, you will be neither a burden to yourself nor useless to others, you will attract many to become your friends and the finest people will flock about you.”
“If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”
“Desultory reading is delightful, but to be beneficial, our reading must be carefully directed.”
“Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.”
“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.”
“You must set your hands to tasks which you can finish or at least hope to finish, and avoid those which get bigger as you proceed and do not cease where you had intended.”
“It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing.”
“Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time. We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession.”
“If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.”
“The greatest remedy for anger is delay.”
“‘Anger is useful,’ says our adversary, ‘because it makes men more ready to fight.’ According to that mode of reasoning, then, drunkenness also is a good thing, for it makes men insolent and daring, and many use their weapons better when the worse for liquor. ... No man becomes braver through anger, except one who without anger would not have been brave at all: anger does not therefore come to assist courage, but to take its place.”
“Reason gives each side time to plead; moreover, she herself demands adjournment, that she may have sufficient scope for the discovery of the truth; whereas anger is in a hurry: reason wishes to give a just decision; anger wishes its decision to be thought just. ... The sword of justice is ill-placed in the hands of an angry man.”
“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more in imagination than in reality.”
“It is in his power not to wish for what he has not, but cheerfully to employ what comes to him.”
“Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.”
“He who craves riches feels fear on their account. No man, however, enjoys a blessing that brings anxiety; he is always trying to add a little more. While he puzzles over increasing his wealth, he forgets how to use it. He collects his accounts, he wears out the pavement in the forum, he turns over his ledger; in short, he ceases to be master and becomes a steward.”
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Lenses
“No place of banishment can be found in the whole world in which man cannot find a home.”
“Even a place of exile suffices to provide one with necessaries; whole kingdoms do not suffice to provide one with superfluities.”