Dan > Dan's Quotes

“Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.”
― Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters

“They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

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

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

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

“Associate with people who are likely to improve you.”
― Seneca

“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

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality”
― 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

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

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

“What is harder than rock? What is softer than water? Yet hard rocks are hollowed out by soft water?”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Natural Questions

“Everyone prefers belief to the exercise of judgement.”
― Seneca

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

“There is no genius without a touch of madness.”
― Seneca

“When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Epistles 1-65

“No man is crushed by misfortune unless he has first been deceived by prosperity”
― Seneca,, Dialogues and Letters

“I am not born for one corner; the whole world is my native land.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“If we could be satisfied with anything, we should have been satisfied long ago.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Epistles 1-65

“We are members of one great body, planted by nature…. We must consider that we were born for the good of the whole”
― Seneca

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

“What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“It is a great thing to know the season for speech and the season for silence”
― Seneca

“Lat, urbes constituit aetas: hora dissolvit: momento fit cinis: diu sylva.

An age builds up cities: an hour destroys them. In a moment the ashes are made, but a forest is a long time growing.”
― Seneca

“I have learned to be a friend to myself Great improvement this indeed Such a one can never be said to be alone for know that he who is a friend to himself is a friend to all mankind”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“Finally, everybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is preoccupied with many things—eloquence cannot, nor the liberal studies—since the mind, when distracted, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it. There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn.”
― Seneca

“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas