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In this kind of life you will find much that is worth your study: the love and practice of the virtues, forgetfulness of the passions, the knowledge of how to live and die, and a life of deep tranquillity.
Seneca • On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It (Penguin Great Ideas)
direct your thoughts, your cares, your wishes, to this alone: contentment with yourself and with the goods that come from yourself. What prosperity could be nearer at hand? Trim yourself back to that small fortune that chance cannot take away.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca • Letters on Ethics: To Lucilius (The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca)
But he also suggests that the real rebuilding work has to happen inside the mind. Seneca’s philosophical and literary creation in the Letters is more powerful and more enduring than the emperor’s burned city: “We are in the power of nothing when death is in our power” (91.21).
Emily Wilson • The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca
being exiled he has been deprived of his country, his friends and family, and his property, but he has taken with him into exile the things that matter most: his place in Nature and his virtue. He adds, “It is the mind that makes us rich; this goes with us into exile, and in the wildest wilderness, having found there all that the body needs for its
... See moreWilliam B. Irvine • A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

[“All vices are less dangerous when open to be seen, and then most pernicious when they lurk under a dissembled good nature.” —Seneca, Ep. 56]
Michel de Montaigne • Michel de Montaigne - The Complete Essays
Prends, je t'en conjure, ô mon cher Lucilius, la seule voie qui te puisse mener au bonheur ; jette au loin, foule aux pieds toute pompe du dehors, tout ce que te promettent les hommes, aspire au vrai bien et sois heureux de ton propre fonds.
Sénèque • Sénèque : Oeuvres complètes illustrées (31 titres annotés et complétés) (French Edition)
No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it, or believes that living through many consulships is a great blessing.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca • Seneca's Letters from a Stoic
Seneca argues for a far more egalitarian model in which every person, or at least every man, is the source of his own success. His philosophical writings constantly revert to the theme of autonomy. The Stoic wise man, Seneca’s ideal, is dependent on nobody, always free, always happy, and in need of nothing and nobody.