Seneca

You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.

I am endeavouring to live every day as if it were a complete life.

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.

Per aspera ad astra.

He who is everywhere is nowhere.

Love of bustle is not industry — it is only the restlessness of a hunted mind.

Do this, my dear Lucilius: claim yourself for yourself; gather and save the time which until now was either being taken from you or stolen from you or simply slipping away.

Assert your right to your own time, and gather together and save the time which up till lately has been either taken from you or filched away or has simply passed by unused.

Truth lies open for all; it has not yet been monopolized. And there is plenty of it left even for posterity to discover.

The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.

Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time. We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession.

No man is free who is not master of himself.

With parsimony a little is sufficient; without it nothing is sufficient; but frugality makes a poor man rich.

The primary indication, to my thinking, of a well-ordered mind is a man's ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company.

There is no reason why poverty should call us away from philosophy—no, nor even actual want. For when hastening after wisdom, we must endure even hunger. Men have endured hunger when their towns were besieged, and what other reward for their endurance did they obtain than that they did not fall under the conqueror’s power? How much greater is the promise of the prize of everlasting liberty, and the assurance that we need fear neither God nor man! Even though we starve, we must reach that goal.

It is to this law that our souls must adjust themselves, this they should follow, this they should obey. Whatever happens, assume that it was bound to happen, and do not be willing to rail at Nature. That which you cannot reform, it is best to endure, and to attend uncomplainingly upon the God under whose guidance everything progresses; for it is a bad soldier who grumbles when following his commander.

What profit is there in crossing the sea and in going from one city to another? If you would escape your troubles, you need not another place but another personality. Perhaps you have reached Athens, or perhaps Rhodes; choose any state you fancy, how does it matter what its character may be? You will be bringing to it your own.

The point is, not how long you live, but how nobly you live. And often this living nobly means that you cannot live long.

Let us become intimate with poverty, so that Fortune may not catch us off our guard. We shall be rich with all the more comfort, if we once learn how far poverty is from being a burden.

No one can lead a happy life, or even one that is bearable, without the pursuit of wisdom, and the perfection of wisdom is what makes the happy life. Yet even the beginnings of wisdom make life bearable. But this conviction must be firmly grasped and not merely adopted in words, if we wish to draw any strength from what we know.

The mind must be given relaxation — it will rise improved and sharper after a good rest. Just as we must not force fertile farmland, for uninterrupted productivity will soon exhaust it, so constant effort will sap our mental vigor.

We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in. We too should so blend whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, that it may be all the clearer for being drawn from many sources; and then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us, we should so blend those several flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.

It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the one who hankers after more.

Withdraw into yourself as much as you can. Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve.

To consort with the crowd is harmful; there is no person who does not make some vice attractive to us, or stamp it upon us, or taint us unconsciously therewith.

He who is brave is free.

Hang on to your youthful enthusiasms — you'll be able to use them better when you're older.

You should rather please yourself than the people; take thought for the quality, not the number, of judgements made about you.

Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.

It is indeed foolish to be unhappy now because you may be unhappy at some future time.

I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know, they do not approve, and what they approve, I do not know.

If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich.

If you wish to have leisure for your mind, either be a poor man, or resemble a poor man. Study cannot be helpful unless you take pains to live simply; and living simply is voluntary poverty.

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.

Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: "Is this the condition that I feared?"

True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future.

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal of it.

If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.

Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I may become a poor man; I shall then be one among many. I may be exiled; I shall then regard myself as born in the place to which I shall be sent. They may put me in chains. What then? Am I free from bonds now? Behold this clogging burden of a body, to which nature has fettered me! “I shall die,” you say; you mean to say “I shall cease to run the risk of sickness; I shall cease to run the risk of imprisonment; I shall cease to run the risk of death.”

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.

In reading of many books is distraction. Accordingly, since you cannot read all the books which you may possess, it is enough to possess only as many books as you can read.

You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.

Men who have made these discoveries before us are not our masters, but our guides.

We should be surprised by none of this; we are born to it. None of these things is unusual or unexpected. It was ever thus and ever will be.