“The man who has anticipated the coming of troubles takes away their power when they arrive.” - Seneca “It does not matter what you bear, but how you bear it.” - Seneca “Timendi causa est nescire - Ignorance is the cause of fear.” - Seneca “He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.” - Seneca “If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable. “As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.” - Seneca “All cruelty springs from weakness.” - Seneca
“A gift consists not in what is done or given, but in the intention of the giver or doer.” - Seneca “We are more often frightened than hurt and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.” - Seneca “Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.” - Seneca “A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.” - Seneca (I’ve included some of his recommended works below.) Hopefully, they’ll inspire you to dig a little deeper into the mind of this great thinker. Here are some of our favorite quotes from Seneca. The lessons you can draw from these works are timeless - that’s why we still read them today.
#Timeless quotes greek political how to#
They wanted to know how to use wisdom to navigate the inevitable pitfalls of life. Seneca and another famous stoic, Marcus Aurelius, used philosophy to live. This is how I first came to discover stoic philosophy, and it changed my life. While I’ve never been exiled to an island or tutored a tyrannical emperor, I am divorced and I worked for someone I didn’t respect. Like most of us, Seneca lived through ups and downs. Nero, thinking Seneca was plotting to overthrow him, ordered him killed.
While Seneca got wealthy, he also got dead. Serving any bad guy - especially Nero - is prosperous until it’s not. Nero would go on to become one of the most tyrannical emperors in the Roman Empire, a fact that caused many people to charge Seneca with hypocrisy - how can one with so much wisdom tutor Nero!?
This is where he stayed for over eight years, until Agrippina, the mother of the future emperor Nero, secured his release to become Nero’s tutor. when Claudius became the emperor, he exiled Seneca to the island of Corsica. Take, as one of many examples, his association with Nero. On the other hand, there is the incongruity between his principles and his life. “We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not Ill-supplied but wasteful of it.” - Seneca Nassim Taleb went so far as to write an entire chapter on Seneca in his book AntiFragile. His thoughts influenced historical figures such as Pascal, Francis Bacon, and Montaigne, and continue to resonate with people today. Using a search for wisdom to navigate the inevitable ups and downs of life, he could be considered a practical philosopher. On one hand, we have his writings, which were both practical and timeless. He’s one of the first stoics for which there are considerable literary remains for us to study.īorn over 2,000 years ago in Spain as the son of Seneca the Elder, Seneca had a mixed reputation. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, known simply as Seneca (or Seneca the Younger), was a stoic philosopher and rhetorician. The death of Seneca, as depicted by Rubens in the early seventeenth century.
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