Quotes from Seneca the Younger

It is equally a fault to believe all men or to believe none.

...nothing is so entirely admirable as a man bravely wretched.

The man who can be compelled knows not how to die.

Many men provoke others to overreach them by excessive suspicion; their extraordinary distrust in some sort justifies the deceit.

Such is the blindness, nay the insanity of mankind, that some men are driven to death by the fear of it.

Chance makes a plaything of a man's life.

The young man must store up, the old man must use.

It is within the power of every man to live his life nobly, but of no man to live forever. Yet so many of us hope that life will go on forever, and so few aspire to live nobly.

There is no evil that does not promise inducements. Avarice promises money; luxury, a varied assortment of pleasures; ambition, a purple robe and applause. Vices tempt you by the rewards they offer.

The good things of prosperity are to be wished; but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.

It is easier to exclude harmful passions than to rule them, and to deny them admittance than to control them after they have been admitted.

It is the mind that makes us rich and happy, in what condition soever we are, and money signifies no more to it than it does to the gods.

The shortest road to wealth lies in the contempt of wealth.

A great fortune is a great slavery.

But it is a pretty thing to see what money will do!

We are always complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end to them.

These individulas have riches just as we say that we 'have a fever,' when really the fever has us.

Many things have fallen only to rise higher.

Where fear is, happiness is not.

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.

Money has yet to make anyone rich.

We are members of one great body. Nature planted in us a mutual love, and fitted us for a social life. We must consider that we were born for the good of the whole.

Nature does not reveal all her secrets at once. We imagine we are initiated in her mysteries: we are, as yet, but hanging around her outer courts.

For greed, all nature is too little.