H > H's Quotes

“Limiting one’s desires actually helps to cure one of fear. ‘Cease to hope … and you will cease to fear.’ … Widely different [as fear and hope] are, the two of them march in unison like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to. Fear keeps pace with hope … both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“Whatever can happen at any time can happen today.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“To be always fortunate, and to pass through life with a soul that has never known sorrow, is to be ignorant of one half of nature.”
― Seneca

“It is more civilized to make fun of life than to bewail it.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“The mind that is anxious about future events is miserable.”
― Seneca

“The best ideas are common property”
― Seneca

“Nothing is burdensome if taken lightly, and nothing need arouse one's irritation so long as one doesn't make it bigger than it is by getting irritated.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“It's not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It's because we dare not venture that they are difficult.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“Regard [a friend] as loyal, and you will make him loyal.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“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

“He who has injured thee was either stronger or weaker than thee. If weaker, spare him; if stronger, spare thyself.”
― Seneca, On Anger

“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

“For what prevents us from saying that the happy life is to have a mind that is free, lofty, fearless and steadfast - a mind that is placed beyond the reach of fear, beyond the reach of desire, that counts virtue the only good, baseness the only evil, and all else but a worthless mass of things, which come and go without increasing or diminishing the highest good, and neither subtract any part from the happy life nor add any part to it?
A man thus grounded must, whether he wills or not, necessarily be attended by constant cheerfulness and a joy that is deep and issues from deep within, since he finds delight in his own resources, and desires no joys greater than his inner joys.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters

“Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future ones.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“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

“The sun also shines on the wicked.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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

“Leisure without books is death, and burial of a man alive.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“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

“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

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

“People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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

“errare humanum est, sed perseverare diabolicum: 'to err is human, but to persist (in the mistake) is diabolical.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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

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

“He who spares the wicked injures the good.”
― Seneca

“True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.”
― Seneca