Seneca

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

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

Clogged with yesterday’s excess, the body drags the mind down with it.

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime.

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn’t got any.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t!

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?

Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.

It isn’t making mistakes that’s critical; it’s correcting them and getting on with the principal task.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

A sudden bold and unexpected question does many times surprise a man and lay him open.