Seneca the Younger Quotes

Virtue depends partly upon training and partly upon practice; you must learn first, and then strengthen your learning by action. If this be true, not only do the doctrines of wisdom help us but the precepts also, which check and banish our emotions by a sort of official decree.

Virtue, though she gets her beginning from nature, yet receives her finishing touches from learning.

In the matter of learning, the difference between the earnest and the careless student stands out clearly. The same holds true in the mastering of passion and the weaknesses to which our nature is subject, as in the acquiring of virtue.

Virtue comes by nature, learning, and practice, and thanks to virtue, all of the aforesaid may deserve approval.

To teach virtue we must educate the emotions, and this means learning "what to feel" in the various circumstances that prompt them.

Assume a virtue, if you have it not. That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat; Of habits devil, is angel yet in this.

It is never too early to try and plant [good principles] in a child, and never too late to cultivate them in the most neglected person.

By doing good we become good.

The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things — not merely industrious, but to love industry — not merely learned, but to love knowledge — not merely pure, but to love purity — not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.

The largest part of goodness is the will to become good.

Little would be wanting to the happiness of life, if every man could conform to the right as soon as he was shown it.

Virtue is not a mushroom, that springeth up of itself in one night when we are asleep, or regard it not; but a delicate plant, that groweth slowly and tenderly, needing much pains to cultivate it, much care to guard it, much time to mature it, in our untoward soil, in this world's unkindly weather.

Men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Character is perfectly educated will.

Education has for its object the formation of character.

The walls of that grand edifice called a good character have to be worked at during life.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

Ethics is the activity of man directed to secure the inner perfection of his own personality.

The worst education which teaches self-denial, is better than the best which teaches everything else, and not that.

If you do not know the laws of right conduct, you cannot form your character.

What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.

I'd rather play a tune on a horn, but I've always felt that I didn't want to train myself. Because when you get a train, you've got to have an engine and a caboose. I think it's better to train the caboose. You train yourself, you strain yourself.

Heart and head are the constituent parts of character; temperament has almost nothing to do with it, and, therefore, character is dependent upon education, and is susceptible of being corrected and improved.

To be good, we must do good; and by doing good we take a sure means of being good, as the use and exercise of the muscles increase their power.

The superior man acquaints himself with many sayings of antiquity and many deeds of the past, in order to strengthen his character thereby.