Peter > Peter's Quotes

“Any person capable of angering you becomes your master;
he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.”
― Epictetus

“How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy, but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress, but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary.
From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. That is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet a Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be a Socrates.”
― Epictetus (From Manual 51)

“True happiness is to understand our duties toward God and man; to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence on the future; not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears, but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is abundantly sufficient.”
― Seneca

“To win true freeedom you must be a slave to philosophy.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“Of this one thing make sure against your dying day - that your faults die before you do.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“Auditur et altera pars. (The other side shall be heard as well.)”
― Seneca, Medea

“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.”
― Seneca

“It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.”
― Seneca

“It does not matter how many books you have, but how good the books are which you have.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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

“But life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“While we wait for life, life passes”
― Seneca

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“Nothing is more honorable than a grateful heart.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“We should every night call ourselves to an account;
What infirmity have I mastered today?
What passions opposed? What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired? Our vices will abort of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“Life is long if you know how to use it.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“A gift consists not in what is done or given, but in the intention of the giver or doer.”
― Seneca, Moral Essays: Volume III

“We learn not in the school, but in life.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“Were all the geniuses of history to focus on this single theme, they could never fully express their bafflement at the darkness of the human mind. No person would give up even an inch of their estate, and the slightest dispute with a neighbor can mean hell to pay; yet we easily let others encroach on our lives—worse, we often pave the way for those who will take it over. No person hands out their money to passersby, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“As long as you live, keep learning how to live.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“Wealth is the slave of a wise man. The master of a fool ”
― Seneca, Moral Essays, Volume I: De Providentia. De Constantia. De Ira. De Clementia

“If you live in harmony with nature you will never be poor; if you live according what others think, you will never be rich.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“Life is like a play: it's not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.”
― Seneca

“Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.”
― Seneca

“Timendi causa est nescire -
Ignorance is the cause of fear.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Natural Questions

“Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow, and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune's control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”
― Seneca

“Only time can heal what reason cannot.”
― Seneca