Quotes by Seneca

The trip doesn’t exist that can set you beyond the reach of cravings, fits of temper, or fears … so long as you carry the sources of your troubles about with you, those troubles will continue to harass and plague you wherever you wander on land or on sea. Does it surprise you that running away doesn’t do you any good? The things you’re running away from are with you all the time.

So long, in fact, as you remain in ignorance of what to aim at and what to avoid, what is essential and what is superfluous, what is upright or honorable conduct and what is not, it will not be travelling but drifting. All this hurrying from place to place won’t bring you any relief, for you’re travelling in the company of your own emotions, followed by your troubles all the way.

Once you have rid yourself of the affliction there, though, every change of scene will become a pleasure. You may be banished to the ends of the earth, and yet in whatever outlandish corner of the world you may find yourself stationed, you will find that place, whatever it may be like, a hospitable home. Where you arrive does not matter so much as what sort of person you are when you arrive there.

The man who spends his time choosing one resort after another in a hunt for peace and quiet will in every place he visits find something to prevent him from relaxing.

Wealth is the slave of a wise man. The master of a fool

It is the sign of a weak mind to be unable to bear wealth.

Oh, what darkness does great prosperity cast over our minds!

If you look on wealth as a thing to be valued your imaginary poverty will cause you torment.

The shortest route to wealth is the contempt of wealth.

For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them

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

The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.

There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

However much you possess theres someone else who has more, and youll be fancying yourself to be short of things you need to exact extent to which you lag behind him.

Nature does not reveal her mysteries once and for all.

For Fate/ The willing leads, the unwilling drags along.

I know that these mental disturbances of mine are not dangerous and give no promise of a storm; to express what I complain of in apt metaphor, I am distressed, not by a tempest, but by sea-sickness.

[Philosophers] have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studies—with the result that they know more about devoting care and attention to their speech than about devoting such attention to their lives.

Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate.