SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF SENECA, TO WHICH PASSAGES MORE OR LESS CLOSELY AKIN OCCUR IN THE SCRIPTURES.
FROM THE LETTERS TO LUCILIUS.
A holy spirit dwells within us, the observer and keeper of the evil and the good; it treats us just as it is treated by us.
If you do what is right, let all men know it; if what is wrong, does it matter that no one knows it, since you know it yourself? O what a wretched man you are if you disregard such a witness!
The human mind has come down from the spirit that dwells on high.
Fortune exempts many from punishment; from fear, no one.
It is natural for those who have done wrong to be afraid.
The light is irksome to a bad conscience.
The guilty have sometimes the good fortune not to be found out; never the certainty of it.
Good precepts, if you often reflect upon them, will profit you equally with good examples.
If thou wouldst gain the favor of the gods, be good.
He adequately worships the gods who imitates them.
It suffices God that he be worshiped and loved; love cannot be mixed with fear.
What thou hast learned, confirm by doing.
A great and holy spirit, it is true, holds converse with us, but it cleaves to its origin.
Let the young reverence and look up to their teachers.
How wisely you live is an important matter: not, how long.
It is not a good thing to live; it is, to live wisely.
He who would live for himself must live for others.
He who has much covets more.
No one is worthy of God save him who contemns riches.
Dare to contemn riches and thus to make thyself worthy of God.
The shortest road to riches is to contemn riches.
Not he who has little but he who covets more is poor.
Thin is the texture of a lie; it is easily seen through if closely examined.
The praise is not in the deed but in the way it is done.
To be master of one’s self is the greatest mastery.
One cause of the evils of our time is that we live after the example of others. We are not guided by reason but led astray by custom.
Money never made anybody rich.
Why did God create the world? He is good; a good being feels no aversion to anything that is good. Therefore He made the world as good as possible. Quoted from Plato.
Some of our time is filched from us, some is stolen outright, some passes unnoticed. But most reprehensible of all things is to lose it by mere negligence; and if you will note carefully, men spend a great part of life in doing evil, the greatest part in doing nothing the whole of it doing something else than they ought. Whom will you name that places any value on time? Who prizes a day? Who realizes that he is dying daily? For we err when we regard death as something in the future; a great part of it has already passed; the portion of our life that is behind us, death holds. Do, therefore, Lucilius, what you write that you are doing, husband every hour; you will be less dependent upon to-morrow if you seize to-day. Everything else belongs to others, time only is ours.
There is a great difference between not wanting to sin and not knowing how.
If thou wouldst get rid of thy vices keep out of bad company.
He worships God who knows Him.
No one commits wrongs for himself alone; he communicates them to others and is in turn led astray by others.
Our minds are dazzled when they look upon truth.
No virtue remains hidden, and it suffers no damage by having been hidden.
Nature has given to all the fundamental principles and seeds of virtue.
Nature does not make us virtuous; it is an art to become good.
If what you are doing is right, all men may know it.
The reward of all the virtues is in the virtues themselves. The recompense of a good deed is to have done it.
Virtue alone brings lasting and sure happiness.
He errs who thinks the gods intentionally inflict injuries on any one; they cannot do so; they can neither receive nor do injury.
So live with men as if God saw thee; so talk with God as if men heard thee.
God has no need of ministering servants: He Himself ministers to men; is present everywhere and in everything.
The gods extend a helping hand to those who would rise. Do you wonder that man goes to the gods? God comes to men, and what is more, He comes into men. No mind is good without God.
All men, if they are traced to their first origin, are from the gods.
Every day, every hour, reminds us of our nothingness and, by some fresh admonition, warns those of their frailty who are prone to forget it.
Give heed to each day as if it were your whole life. Nothing will so much enable you to exercise control over yourself in all things as to think often of the uncertainty and brevity of life.
You will grant that the greatest piety toward the gods is a characteristic of a good man; and so whatever may befall him he will bear with equanimity, for he will know that it has happened in harmony with that divine law by which all things are governed.
No one is strong enough to rise by his own strength; every man needs some one to extend a hand, some one to lead him.
So let us live, so let us talk, that our destiny may find us prepared and ready to follow it. Great is the soul that has yielded itself to God; on the other hand, that one is cowardly and degenerate that resists, that finds fault with the order of the world, and is more ready to set the the gods right than itself.
We ought to have before our minds some one whom we revere; some one whose influence makes even our most secret thoughts holier.
Long is a way by precepts; short and effectual, by examples.
Weaker minds, however, have need of some one to go before who shall say, “This avoid, this do.”
The community of which we form a part is very much like an arch built of stone; it would at once fall down if one did not support another.
We are members of an immense body. Nature begat us as kinsmen, since it formed us of the same elements and for the same end.
What is it that draws us in one direction when we would go in another, that urges us on when we want to resist, that strives against our desires and does not permit us to do what we purpose?
If thou wishest to be loved, love!
No one is free that is the slave of his body.
We ought to live in this thought: I was not born for a corner only; my country is this entire world.
The beginning of salvation is the knowledge of sin. Quoted from Epicurus.
Philosophy sheds its light upon all men.
It is so difficult for us to get well because we do not know that we are sick.
It is the strongest evidence that our mind is directed toward its own improvement when we see faults that we had not before observed.
It is an infirmity of mind not to be able to bear riches.
To live right is in the power of everybody.
The acknowledgement of a fault is the beginning of a better life.
He who does not admit his proneness to do wrong has no desire to be corrected. You must recognize your errors before you can correct them.
The ancients held the first requisite of repentance to be an examination of one’s self, especially since without this, life would not be worth living.
There is no vice without some excuse.
You ask me what you should particularly avoid. (I answer,) a crowd. You cannot with safety to yourself mingle in a large company. I must verily confess my own weakness. I never bring back the same character that I took with me; something which I had banished, returns; something else that I had quieted, is aroused.... But nothing is so damaging to a good character as to spend much time at public spectacles, for with the pleasure we receive vices the more easily creep in unawares.
It is a large part of goodness to desire to become good.
There is a certain fitness in the feeling of sorrow; this the sage ought to heed, and just as in everything else so in grief there is a proper mean.
What fate did not give it did not take away.
To obey God is liberty.
No one is out of the reach of the temptation of vice unless he has banished it wholly from his breast; and no one has banished it wholly until he has put wisdom in its stead.
Great is the praise if man is helpful to man. We admonish you to extend a hand to the shipwrecked; to point out the way to the lost; to share your bread with the hungry.
No one ever renders a service to another without also rendering a service to himself.
Often what is given is a small matter; what follows from it, a great one.
When we reason upon the immortality of the soul, we do not regard as of little weight the universal belief of men who either fear or revere the gods of the lower world.
That day which thou dreadest as if it were thy last is the day of the birth into eternity.
A time will come that shall unite us and bring us into each other’s company.
Then shall our soul have reason to rejoice because, freed from this darkness in which it is involved, it shall see the light, no longer with feeble vision, but in all the brightness of day, and it will have returned to its own heaven since it will again occupy the place which belongs to it by right of birth. Its origin calls it on high.
Let another begin a quarrel, but let reconciliation begin with thee.
What else is nature than God and the divine reason that permeates the whole world and all its parts. Whithersoever thou turnest thou wilt see Him before thee; there is no place where He is not; He Himself fills all His work.
Every crime is committed before the deed is done.
The human mind has come down from the spirit that dwells on high.
Believe me, the creator of this vast universe, whoever he may have been, whether it was a god, master of everything, whether it was an incorporeal intelligence able to bring forth the most brilliant marvels, whether it was a divine spirit diffused with equal energy in the smallest and the largest things, whether it was destiny and an immutable concatenation of causes linked together: this sovereign potentate did not wish to leave us dependent upon any one else even in the smallest matters.
Stars shall impinge upon stars and all matter that now delights us with its beautiful order will burn in one huge conflagration.
How often he who refuses pardon to others begs it for himself!
It is base to say one thing and mean another; it is baser to write one thing and mean another.
A wise man will pardon an injury, though it be great, and if he can do it without breach of piety and fidelity, that is, if the whole injury pertains to himself.
As far as thou canst, accuse thyself, try thyself, discharge the office, first of a prosecutor, then of a judge, lastly of an intercessor.
We can never quarrel enough with our vices, which, I beseech thee, persecute perpetually. Cast from thee everything that corrupts the heart; and if thou canst not otherwise get rid of it, spare not the heart itself.
FROM DE BENEFICIIS.
Nature is not without God nor is God without nature. Both are the same and their functions are the same. So, too, nature, destiny, fortune, are all the names of the same God.
It is the mark of a noble and generous soul to be helpful, to do good; he who confers favors, imitates the gods.
Beneficence always makes haste; what one does willingly one does quickly.
We owe no thanks for a favor that has for a long time adhered to the hands of the giver, as it were; which he seems to have let go with reluctance and which one might almost say had been wrested from him.
Those favors are most gratifying to us that are deliberately and willingly offered, and in connection with which the only hesitancy is on the part of the recipient.
I do not make the favors I confer a matter of public record.
He who intends to be grateful ought to think about requiting a favor as soon as he receives it.
This is the law of beneficence between two persons: the one should forthwith forget that he has given; the other should never forget that he has received.
You buy from the physician a thing that is above price, life and health; from the teacher of belles-lettres, acquaintance with the liberal arts. Yet it is not the value of these things that you pay for but their pains, because when they are serving us they give up their private business to devote themselves to us.
The sun rises for the evil also.
God has given certain benefactions to all men, and from which none are excluded.
Who is so wretched, so despised, who born to so hard and sorrowful a destiny that he has never perceived the munificence of the gods? Seek out even those who bewail their fate and who are always complaining, you will not find among the entire number one who has not experienced the beneficence of heaven; there is not one for whom there has not flowed something from the most inexhaustible of all fountains.
Add, now, that external circumstances do not coerce the gods, but their sempiternal will is their law. They have established an order of events which they do not change. The gods never repent of their first purpose.
Beneficence consists not in what is done or given, but in the spirit of the doer or giver.
It is a most glorious work to save even the unwilling and refractory.
The door to virtue is closed to no one; it is open to all, admits all; virtue invites everybody, free-born, freedmen, slaves, kings and exiles. It selects neither class nor condition, it seeks the man only.
Nature directs us to do good to all men whether bond or free, free-born or emancipated slaves. Wherever there is a human being, there is a place for beneficence.
He who reasons thus (like Epicurus), does not hear the voices of supplicants and the prayers offered everywhere, in public and private, with hands outstretched toward heaven. This could not be, nor is it possible that all men should have willingly consented to the folly of addressing deaf divinities and powerless gods, if they had not recognized their benefactions, sometimes given spontaneously, sometimes in answer to prayer, always great, timely, averting by their intervention impending disasters.
FROM VARIOUS SOURCES.
It is easy to form the mind while it is still tender; but it is difficult to root out those vices that have grown up with it.
It is a great thing to know when to speak and when to be silent.
The vices of others we have before our eyes; our own, behind our backs.
Use your ears oftener than your tongue.
Nothing is more out of place in him who is inflicting punishment than anger.
It is not the issue of a thing that ought to be taken into account, but the purpose.
Every crime is committed before the deed is done.
To cupidity nothing is enough; to nature even a little is enough.
Vice takes possession of us unconsciously; virtue is difficult to find, and we need a guide and teacher. Vices are learned without a teacher.
Stars shall impinge upon stars and all matter that now delights us with its beautiful order shall burn in one huge conflagration.
All that is best can neither be given to men nor taken from them.
There are two things, the most precious of all, that attend us whithersoever we turn our steps: common nature and personal virtue. These things are so, believe me, because they were so willed by the creator of the universe, whether it is that God who controls everything, or incorporeal reason, the artificer of great works, or the divine spirit that pervades equally the greatest and the smallest things.
If the dead have any feeling, the soul of my brother, now set free from a long imprisonment, is at length in the full enjoyment of his freedom and his majority; he beholds with delight the nature of things and looks down upon human affairs from his high abode; but things divine, the causes of which he so long sought out in vain, he now beholds at close range. Why then do I pine away in sorrow for him who is either blessed or not all? To mourn for one who is in bliss is envy; for one who is not, folly.
Borne on high, he soars among beatified spirits, and a sanctified company welcomes him—the Scipios, the Catos, released by the beneficence of death. There thy father devotes himself to his grandson, resplendent in the new light even though in that place all are known to each. He explains to him the motions of the stars around him; not from conjectures, but, versed in the knowledge of all things, he gladly inducts him into the arcana of nature.
If you will believe those who have looked more deeply into the truth, our whole life is a punishment.
For those who sail this sea so stormy, so exposed to every tempest, there is no harbor except death.
He now enjoys a serene and cloudless heaven. From this humble and low abode, he has sped swiftly into that region, wherever it may be, where souls, freed from their chains, are received into the abode of the blest. He now roams about at will, and beholds with supremest delight all that is good in the universe.... He has not left us; he has gone before.