Seneca quotes

4–65 BCE · Corduba (now Cordoba, Spain)

• There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

• Fire tries gold, misfortune tries brave men.

• The greatest remedy for anger is delay: beg anger to grant you this at the first, not in order that it may pardon the offence, but that it may form a right judgment about it: if it delays, it will come to an end.

• You cannot find any one who wants to distribute his money; yet among how many people does every one distribute his life? men covetously guard their property from waste, but when it comes to waste of time, they are most prodigal of that of which it would become them to be sparing.

• You fear everything, like mortals as you are, and yet you desire everything as if you were immortals.

• Thus it is: we do not receive a short life, but we make it a short one, and we are not poor in days, but wasteful of them.