Quotes from Seneca the Younger

It is difficult to bring people to goodness with lessons, but it is easy to do so by example.

Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing.

Time discovers truth.

We should have a bond of sympathy for all sentient beings, knowing that only the depraved and base take pleasure in the sight of blood and suffering.

The great pilot can sail even when his canvass is rent.

A young man respects and looks up to his teachers.

Virtue needs a director and guide. Vice can be learned even without a teacher.

He who does not want to die should not want to live. For life is tendered to us with the proviso of death. Life is the way to this destination.

We are wrong in looking forward to death: in great measure it's past already.

You will die not because you're ill, but because you're alive.

Anyone can stop a man's life, but no one his death; a thousand doors open on to it.

Nothing is so false as human life, nothing so treacherous. God knows no one would have accepted it as a gift, if it had not been given without our knowledge.

Tota vita nihil aliud quam ad mortem iter est. The whole of life is nothing but a journey to death.

It is a tedious thing to be always beginning life; they live badly who always begin to live.

There is as much greatness of mind in acknowledging a good turn, as in doing it.

Our Creator shall continue to dwell above the sky, and that is where those on earth will end their thanksgiving.

See how many are better off than you are, but consider how many are worse.

It's not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.

Time is the one thing that is given to everyone in equal measure.

It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and - even more surprising - it takes the whole of life to learn how to die.

Not a soul takes thought how well he may live- only how long: yet a good life might be everybody's, a long one can be nobody's.

Before old age I took care to live well; in old age I take care to die well; but to die well is to die willingly.

We are taught for the schoolroom, not for life.

Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones at hand do more toward a happy life than whole volumes that we know not where to find.