Sublime

Latin quotes will include a great deal of Seneca’s aphorisms—lines like “Necessity is usually more powerful than duty” (Trojan Women 581), or “Nature takes revenge on everybody” (Phaedra 352), or “Crime must be hidden by crime” (Medea 721). The aphorisms often speak to recurrent preoccupations of Seneca’s, with fortune and its many reversals (“A ma

what you must do is not add to his pleasure but subtract from his desires.

When thou hast done a good act and another has received it, why dost thou look for a third thing besides these, as fools do, either to have the reputation of having done a good act or to obtain a return?

He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.

“Nobody learns what he can do, except by trying” (3.4.4). A good man may be exiled, reduced to poverty, and have his wife or children die—all events that Seneca suffered; but that good man “can be called miserable, but can never be so” (Providence 3.1). The real danger to a person’s happiness comes not from danger and adversity but from excesses of

Then he would leave for the underworld, where I could never go, for gods are the opposite of death.

'Are you quite sure that the Edmund in that pneumatic chair hasn't been just as heavily punished as the Edmund who's wounded and bleeding to death? The gods are just. Haven't they used his pleasant vices as an instrument to degrade him?'