• O when shall you see the time when you shall know that time means nothing to you, when you shall be peaceful and calm, careless of the morrow, because you are enjoying your life to the full?

    —Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

  • Make progress, and, before all else, endeavour to be consistent with yourself. And when you would find out whether you have accomplished anything, consider whether you desire the same things today that you desired yesterday. A shifting of the will indicates that the mind is at sea, heading in various directions, according to the course of the wind.

    —Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

  • Observe such men, and you will note that within a short space of time they laugh to excess and rage to excess.

    —Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

  • Some boast of their faults. Do you think that the man has any thought of mending his ways who counts over his vices as if they were virtues?

    —Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

  • That trouble once removed, all change of scene will become pleasant; though you may be driven to the uttermost ends of the earth, in whatever corner of a savage land you may find yourself, that place, however forbidding, will be to you a hospitable abode. The person you are matters more than the place to which you go; for that reason we should not make the mind a bondsman to any one place. Live in this belief: “I am not born for any one corner of the universe; this whole world is my country.”

    —Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

  • “What is wisdom? Always desiring the same things, and always refusing the same things.”

    —Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

  • Observe yourself, then, and see whether your dress and your house are inconsistent, whether you treat yourself lavishly and your family meanly, whether you eat frugal dinners and yet build luxurious houses. You should lay hold, once for all, upon a single norm to live by, and should regulate your whole life according to this norm.

    —Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

  • It shows much more courage to remain dry and sober when the mob is drunk and vomiting; but it shows greater self-control to refuse to withdraw oneself and to do what the crowd does, but in a different way,—thus neither making oneself conspicuous nor becoming one of the crowd. For one may keep holiday without extravagance.

    —Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

  • Riches have shut off many a man from the attainment of wisdom; poverty is unburdened and free from care.

    —Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

  • by overloading the body with food you strangle the soul and render it less active. Accordingly, limit the flesh as much as possible, and allow free play to the spirit.

    —Seneca, Letters from a Stoic