This is a list of Seneca quotes used in the texts in this blog. They are here for your inspiration and reference. Seneca is one of best known Stoic writers. His dialogues and essays contain a different level of elegance. It clearly shows that Seneca was well versed in the art of rethoric. Which leads to some beautiful quotes. These texts give us a wonderful sense of how Romans used to write and speak. When dealing with quotes, please be mindful whether they are truly said by the person it says. Gregory Sadler has a YouTube series where he debunks quotes falsely attributed to philosophers. Here is his video on Plato.
“The wise man is content with himself.”
Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Letter IX
Post: On Being Content with Yourself, How to Find your Purpose Through Stoicism, Five Stoic Quotes to Change Your Life
“…we say the wise man is self-content; he is so in the sense that he is able to do without friends, not that he desires to do without them.”
Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Letter IX
Post: On Being Content with Yourself, Five Stoic Quotes to Change Your Life
“It does not matter what you bear, but how you bear it.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, On Providence, 2
Post: On Dealing With Loss
“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter LXXVIII
Post: What is Courage
“Whatever fate one man can strike can come to all of us alike.”
Publius, From Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, Consolation to Marcia, 9
Post: On Why Me, Dialogues and Essays – Seneca
“It is not that we have a brief length of time to live, but that we squander a great deal of that time.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, On the Shortness of Life,1
Post: What is Temperance
“Life, it is thanks to death that you are precious in my eyes.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, Consolation to Marcia, 20
Post: What is Stoicism, Why Death Needs Rebranding
“Life is long, if only you knew how to use it.”
Seneca, Dialogues, On the Shortness of life, 2
Post: On Having Regrets, Dialogues and Essays – Seneca
“You are unfortunate in my judgement, for you have never been unfortunate. You have passed through life with no antagonist; no one will know what you were capable of, not even yourself.”
Seneca, Dialogues, On Providence, 4
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“How nice it is to have out-worn one’s desires and left them behind.”
Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Letter XII
Post: On Change
“Greed is satisfied by nothing, but nature finds satisfaction even in scant measures.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, Consolation to Helvia, 10
Post: Become Financially Independent Through Stoicism
“But since the first essential is not to become angry, the second to cease being angry, and the third to cure also anger in others.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, On Anger, 5
Post: How to Control Anger Through Stoicism
“Indifferent to great endeavors.”
Reference to Aristotle by Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, On anger, 3
Post: How to Control Anger Through Stoicism
“So, tell me, will someone call a man sane who, as if caught up in a tempest, does not walk but is driven along, and takes as his master a furious demon…?”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, On Anger, 3
Post: How to Control Anger Through Stoicism
“It makes havoc of the resolutions essential to virtue achieving anything.”
Seneca, Dialogues and essays, On Anger, 3
Post: How to Control Anger Through Stoicism
“What is the need to weep at parts of life? All life is worthy of our tears: Fresh problems will press upon you before you have done with the old ones.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, Consolation to Marcia, 11
Post: Why we need a Philosophy of life
“How can you wonder your travels to you no good, when you carry yourself around with you? You are saddled with the very thing that drove you away.”
Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Letter XXVIII
Post: Why we need a Philosophy of life, Why we Travel, What Does Home Mean?
“If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”
Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Letter CIV
Post: Why we Travel
“You are running away in your own company.”
Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Letter XXVIII
Post: Why we Travel
“Away with the world’s opinion of you – it’s always unsettled and divided.”
Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Letter XXVI
Post: How to Deal with Criticism Through Stoicism
“For the wise man regards wealth as a slave, the fool as a master, the wise man accords no importance to wealth, but in your eyes wealth is everything.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, On the Happy Life, 26
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“If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to people’s opinions, you will never be rich.”
Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Letter XVI
Post: Budgeting like a Stoic: How to save more money
“Where money is concerned, the ideal amount is one that does not fall into poverty and yet is not far removed from poverty.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, On the Tranquillity of the Mind, 8
Post: Budgeting like a Stoic: How to save more money
“But this is the result of an excessive lack of self-control and blind love for some commodity; for when a man seeks bad things instead of good it is dangerous for him to attain his ambitions.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, On the Happy Life, 14
Post: How to Resist Temptations Like a Stoic: Taming Dubai
“The more and greater the pleasures are, the more inferior is that man the crowd calls happy, the greater is the number of masters he has to serve.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, On the Happy Life, 14
Post: How to Resist Temptations Like a Stoic: Taming Dubai
“Besides, a man who follows someone else not only does not find anything, he is not even looking.”
Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Letter XXXIII
Post; The Collective Existential Crisis
“I propose to value them according to their character, not their jobs.”
Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Letter XLVII
Post: How to Find your Purpose Through Stoicism
“I say that wealth is not a good; for if it was, it would make men good; as it is, since something that is found among wicked men cannot be called good, I deny it this name. But that it is desirable, that it is useful and confers great benefit on life, I do admit.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, On the Happy Life, 24
Post: Investing Like a Stoic
“You ask what is the proper limit to a person’s wealth? First, having what is essential, and second, having what is enough.”
Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Letter II
Post: Investing Like a Stoic
“Such things should be despised, not to stop himself having them, but to avoid worry when he does have them; He does not drive them away, but accompanies them to the door, if they leave him, as an untroubled host.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, On the Happy Life, 21
Post: Investing Like a Stoic
“Wealth is not a good.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, On Providence, 5
Post: Investing like a Stoic
“For this reason it is better to conquer our sadness than to deceive it; for once it has departed, seduced by pleasures or engrossing pursuits, it rises up again and gathers fresh momentum for its fury from its very rest; but angry grief that has yielded to reason is laid to rest for ever.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, Consolation to Helvia, 17
Post: How to Act Like a Stoic, How to deal with you emotions like a Stoic
“You ask me to say what you should consider it particularly important to avoid. My answer is this: a mass crowd. It is something to which you cannot entrust yourself yet without risk. I at any rate am ready to confess my own frailty in this respect.”
Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Letter VII
Post: How to Deal With Peer Pressure
“Retire into yourself as much as you can. Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those whom you are capable of improving. The process is a mutual one: Men learn as they teach.”
Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Letter VII
Post: How to Deal With Peer Pressure
“A few is enough for me; so is one; and so is none.”
Unknown person quoted by Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Letter VII
Post: How to Deal With Peer Pressure
“Such pleasures are insubstantial and unreliable; even if they don’t do one any harm, they’re fleeting in character. Look around for some enduring good instead. And nothing answers this description except what the spirit discovers for itself within itself. A good character is the only guarantee of everlasting, carefree happiness.”
Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Letter XXVII
Post: How to Enjoy Life as a Stoic
“I find some people who say that a certain restlessness dwells naturally in the hearts of men, prompting them to change their dwelling-places and find new homes; for man has been given an inconstant and restless mind that lingers nowhere, but travels far and wide, dispatching its thoughts to all place known and unknown, roving, intolerant of rest, and delighting in new environments.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, Consolation to Helvia, 6
Post: What Does Home Mean?
“Two most beautiful things will follow us wherever we go, universal nature and our own virtue. This, believe me, was the will of the great creator of the universe, whoever he was, whether a god with power over all, or incorporeal reason, the designer of mighty works, or a divine spirit permeating all things great and small with equal energy, or fate and an unchangeable sequence of causes that cling one to another; this, I say, was his will, in order that only the most trivial of our possessions should fall under the control of another. All that is of the greatest worth for a man lies outside the power of his fellow men, and can neither be given or taken away.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, Consolation to Helvia, 8
Post: What does Home Mean?
“And so, eagerly, with heads high and unfaltering steps, let us hasten wherever circumstances take us, let us traverse each and every land: no place of exile can be found within the universe, for nothing within the universe is foreign to man.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, Consolation to Helvia, 8
Post: What Does Home Mean?
“When one has lost a friend one’s eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Tears, yes, there should be, but no lamentation.”
Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Letter LXIII
Post: What is Temperance
“If you grieve for your son’s death, it is an accusation of the time when he was born; for at birth his death was proclaimed; into this condition he was fathered, this was the fate that accompanied him immediately from the womb.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, Consolation to Marcia, 10
Post: Why Death Needs Rebranding
“There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Seneca, Moral letter to Lucilius, Book 2, Letter 13.4
Post: How to Deal with Fear Like a Stoic, Five Stoic Quotes to Change Your Life
“But virtue only comes to a character which has been thoroughly schooled and trained and brought to a pitch of perfection by unremitting practice. We are born for it, but not with it. And even in the best of people, until you cultivate it there is only the material for virtue, not virtue itself.”
Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Letter XC
Post: How to Forgive Like a Stoic
“Before anything it is imperative that a man reaches an estimate of himself, because generally we suppose ourselves to be capable of more than we are.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, On the Tranquillity of the Mind, 6
Post: How to Increase your Self-Awareness
“We must next evaluate what we propose to undertake, and compare our strength with the tasks we intend to attempt.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, On the Tranquillity of the Mind, 6
Post: How to Increase your Self-Awareness
“This is why we say that nothing happens to the wise man contrary to his expectations: we exempt him, not from the accidents, but the blunders that befall men, and everything turns out for him, not as he wished, but as he thought.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, On the Tranquillity of the Mind, 13
Post: How to Manage Expectations Like a Stoic
“For the man who busies himself in many things often gives Fortune power over him, and the safest course is to tempt her only rarely but always to keep her in one’s thoughts, never placing any trust in her promises but saying instead: ‘I will make the voyage unless something happens,’ and ‘I will become praetor unless something stands in my way, and ‘My business venture will succeed unless something interferes.”
Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, On the Tranquillity of the Mind, 13
Post: How to Manage Expectations Like a Stoic
“At whatever point you leave life, if you leave it in the right way, it is a whole.”
Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Letter LXXVII
Post: Death and Stoicism: A Peaceful Acceptance
“No one is so ignorant as not to know that some day he must die.”
Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Letter LXXVII
Post: Death and Stoicism: A Peaceful Acceptance
“Remaining dry and sober takes a good deal more strength of will when everyone about one is puking drunk.”
Seneca, Letter From A Stoic, Letter XVIII
