Zachery > Zachery's Quotes

“Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow, and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune's control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”
― 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.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.”
― Seneca

“Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.”
― Seneca

“It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.”
― Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters

“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. ... The life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.”
― Seneca

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“He who is brave is free”
― Seneca

“Life is like a play: it's not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.”
― 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.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters

“If you live in harmony with nature you will never be poor; if you live according what others think, you will never be rich.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“We should every night call ourselves to an account;
What infirmity have I mastered today?
What passions opposed? What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired? Our vices will abort of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“Life is long if you know how to use it.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“While we wait for life, life passes”
― Seneca

“It's not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It's because we dare not venture that they are difficult.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.”
― Seneca

“What man
can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is
dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed,
Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“And this, too, affords no small occasion for anxieties - if you are bent on assuming a pose and never reveal yourself to anyone frankly, in the fashion of many who live a false life that is all made up for show; for it is torturous to be constantly watching oneself and be fearful of being caught out of our usual role. And we are never free from concern if we think that every time anyone looks at us he is always taking-our measure; for many things happen that strip off our pretence against our will, and, though all this attention to self is successful, yet the life of those who live under a mask cannot be happy and without anxiety. But how much pleasure there is in simplicity that is pure, in itself unadorned, and veils no part of its character!{PlainDealer+} Yet even such a life as this does run some risk of scorn, if everything lies open to everybody; for there are those who disdain whatever has become too familiar. But neither does virtue run any risk of being despised when she is brought close to the eyes, and it is better to be scorned by reason of simplicity than tortured by perpetual pretence.”
― Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters

“Brave men rejoice in adversity, just as brave soldiers triumph in war.”
― Seneca

“To win true freeedom you must be a slave to philosophy.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“It's not that we have little time, but more that we waste a good deal of it.”
― Seneca

“And what’s so bad about your being deprived of that?... All things seem unbearable to people who have become spoilt, who have become soft through a life of luxury, ailing more in the mind than they ever are in the body.”
― Seneca

“What fortune has made yours is not your own.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic