Seneca Quotes

On quitting the job that is quietly eating your years:

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.

On postponing the life you want until some future promotion:

While we wait for life, life passes.

On waiting for the perfect moment to repair a friendship:

The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.

On calming the anxious spiral before a hard conversation:

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

On measuring a life cut short by what it held not its length:

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

On worrying about a diagnosis before the test results are in:

He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.

On picking a direction before picking a strategy:

If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.

On whether wisdom can be shortcut without doing the work:

No man was ever wise by chance.

On leaving the safe job to start over later than planned:

Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.

On getting out of bed in the middle of grief:

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

On finally applying for the job you assumed was out of reach:

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.

On staying in a hard role because it is building something in you:

Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.

Wondering if the grief over a loss will ever fully lift:

No one grieves for ever unless the loss involves also a loss of hope.

Deciding how to remember someone you have lost without being consumed by sorrow:

Let us see to it that the recollection of those whom we have lost becomes a pleasant memory to us.

Figuring out whether someone in your life is truly a friend:

If you consider any man a friend whom you do not trust as you trust yourself, you are mightily mistaken and do not sufficiently understand what true friendship means.

Deciding how to treat a stranger who cannot repay you:

Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for kindness.

Deciding how to treat someone with less power than you:

Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies.

Choosing whether to respond in the heat of the moment or wait:

Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.

Deciding whether to chase the next promotion or enjoy the role you have now:

True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future.