Seneca Stoicism Quotes & Sayings

Here is your great soul - the man who has given himself over to Fate; on the other hand, that man is a weakling and a degenerate who struggles and maligns the order of the universe and would rather reform the gods than reform himself. — Seneca.

The boon that could be given can be withdrawn. — Seneca.

Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We've been using them not because we needed them but because we had them. — Seneca.

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

Seneca's version of that Stoicism is antifragility from fate. No downside from Lady Fortuna, plenty of upside. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Love sometimes injures. Friendship always benefits, After friendship is formed you must trust, but before that you must judge. — Seneca.

If what you have seems insufficient to you, then though you possess the world, you will yet be miserable. — Seneca.

To be everywhere is to be nowhere. — Seneca.

Remember that all we have is "on loan" from Fortune, which can reclaim it without our permission - indeed, without even advance notice. Thus, we should love all our dear ones, but always with the thought that we have no promise that we may keep them forever - nay, no promise even that we may keep them for long. — Seneca.

To want to know more than is sufficient is a form of intemperance. Apart from which this kind of obsession with the liberal arts turns people into pedantic, irritating, tactless, self-satisfied bores, not learning what they need simply because they spend their time learning things they will never need. The scholar Didymus wrote four thousand works: I should feel sorry him if he had merely read so many useless works. — Seneca.

Philosophy calls for simple living, not for doing penance, and the simple way of life need not be a crude one. — Seneca.

If you apply yourself to study you will avoid all boredom with life, you will not long for night because you are sick of daylight, you will be neither a burden to yourself nor useless to others, you will attract many to become your friends and the finest people will flock about you. — Seneca.

Why be concerned about others, come to that, when you've outdone your own self? Set yourself a limit which you couldn't even exceed if you wanted to, and say good-bye at last to those deceptive prizes more precious to those who hope for them than to those who have won them. If there were anything substantial in them they would sooner or later bring a sense of fullness; as it is they simply aggravate the thirst of those who swallow them. — Seneca.

The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what is in Fortune's control and abandoning what lies in yours. — Seneca.

Nothing is burdensome if taken lightly, and nothing need arouse one's irritation so long as one doesn't make it bigger than it is by getting irritated. — 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.

Regard [a friend] as loyal, and you will make him loyal. — Seneca.

Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company. — Seneca.

You should ... live in such a way that there is nothing which you could not as easily tell your enemy as keep to yourself. — Seneca.

It does good also to take walks out of doors, that our spirits may be raised and refreshed by the open air and fresh breeze: sometimes we gain strength by driving in a carriage, by travel, by change of air, or by social meals and a more generous allowance of wine. — Seneca.

Seneca and stoicism as a back door to explain why everything antifragile has to have more upside than downside — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Whoever has nothing to hope, let him despair of nothing. — Seneca The Younger

It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable. — Seneca.

What fortune has made yours is not your own. — Seneca.

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

[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. — Seneca.

My advice is really this: what we hear the philosophers saying and what we find in their writings should be applied in our pursuit of the happy life. We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching, and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application - not far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech - and learn them so well that words become works. No one to my mind lets humanity down quite so much as those who study philosophy as if it were a sort of commercial skill and then proceed to live in a quite different manner from the way they tell other people to live. — Seneca.

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

But is life really worth so much? Let us examine this; it's a different inquiry. We will offer no solace for so desolate a prison house; we will encourage no one to endure the overlordship of butchers. We shall rather show that in every kind of slavery, the road of freedom lies open. I will say to the man to whom it befell to have a king shoot arrows at his dear ones [Prexaspes], and to him whose master makes fathers banquet on their sons' guts [Harpagus]: 'What are you groaning for, fool?... Everywhere you look you find an end to your sufferings. You see that steep drop-off? It leads down to freedom. You see that ocean, that river, that well? Freedom lies at its bottom. You see that short, shriveled, bare tree? Freedom hangs from it.... You ask, what is the path to freedom? Any vein in your body. — Seneca.

It is a great man that can treat his earthenware as if it was silver, and a man who treats his silver as if it was earthenware is no less great. — Seneca.

For what prevents us from saying that the happy life is to have a mind that is free, lofty, fearless and steadfast - a mind that is placed beyond the reach of fear, beyond the reach of desire, that counts virtue the only good, baseness the only evil, and all else but a worthless mass of things, which come and go without increasing or diminishing the highest good, and neither subtract any part from the happy life nor add any part to it?
A man thus grounded must, whether he wills or not, necessarily be attended by constant cheerfulness and a joy that is deep and issues from deep within, since he finds delight in his own resources, and desires no joys greater than his inner joys. — Seneca.