Quotes from Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Whenever the speech is corrupted so is the mind.

While we are postponing, life speeds by.

There is no person so severely punished, as those who subject themselves to the whip of their own remorse.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

Consider, when you are enraged at any one, what you would probably think if he should die during the dispute.

Do everything as in the eye of another.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.

I will govern my life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one and read the other, for what does it signify to make anything a secret to my neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of our hearts, all our privacies are open?

Success is not greedy, as people think, but insignificant. That is why it satisfies nobody.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

A great mind becomes a great fortune.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

Life is the fire that burns and the sun that gives light. Life is the wind and the rain and the thunder in the sky. Life is matter and is earth, what is and what is not, and what beyond is in Eternity.

If a man knows not what harbor he seeks, any wind is the right wind.

Health is the soul that animates all the enjoyments of life, which fade and are tasteless without it.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

The wish for healing has always been half of health.

What nature requires is obtainable, and within easy reach. It is for the superfluous we sweat.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.