Seneca Philosophy Quotes & Sayings

What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself. — Seneca.

We all of us complain of the shortness of time, saith Seneca, and yet have much more than we know what to do with. Our lives, says he, are spent either in doing nothing at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in doing nothing that we ought to do: we are always complaining our days are few, and acting as though there would no end of them.- On the Right Use of Time — Joseph Addison

I can show you a philtre, compounded without drugs, herbs, or any witch's incantation: 'If you want to be loved, love. — Seneca.

So the life of a philosopher extends widely: he is not confined by the same boundary as are others. He alone is free from the laws that limit the human race, and all ages serve him as though he were a god. — Seneca.

Out of his zestful study of Man, from Thucydides to the Encyclopaedists, from Seneca to Rousseau, he had confirmed into an unassailable conviction his earliest conscious impressions of the general insanity of his own species. — Rafael Sabatini

All outdoors may be bedlam, provided there is no disturbance within. — Seneca.

Philosophers should be, as Seneca put it, 'lawyers for humanity'. Make what you think and feel count; the examined life has global dimensions. — Martha C. Nussbaum

Elegant and lucid ... a pitch-perfect clarion call, issued not with preachy hubris but from a deep place of humility, for awakening to the greatest rewards of living ... The Road to Character is an essential read in its entirety-Anne Lamott with a harder edge of moral philosophy, Seneca with a softer edge of spiritual sensitivity, E. F. Schumacher for perplexed moderns. — Maria Popova