Episode 48: Stoic Maxims

Maxims are short easy to remember sayings that help you to remember the tenets of a philosophy. This week we'll look at several as written in Seneca's Moral Letters to Lucilius.
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Moral Letters 123
“No man is good by chance”
Virtue must be learned, pleasure is low and even pursued by animals.
“Glory is an empty and fleeting thing, lighter than air.
“Poverty is not an evil thing unless a man resist it”
Death is not an evil, it alone is the equal privilege of mankind.

122
The duty and the proof of life consist in action

120
The surest way to spot a man with an evil mind is his inconsistency.
119
He who has much desire more, but he who has enough has something the rich man will never have. A stopping point.
118
What you think is the top of the latter is merely another rung.
113
Self-command is the greatest command of all.
110
What is necessary will meet you everywhere, you must seek out what is superfluous.
109
“what good does this do me? Make more brave now, more just, more restrained?” If not it is superfluous material.


104
A good man should not live as long as it pleases him, but as long as he ought.

101
Only he who is not profiting from the present is anxious about the future.

99
Life is not good or evil, it is the place where good and evil exist.

96
Life is really a battle.
94
You need never believe that a man can become happy through the unhappiness of another.


92
Disasters and losses and wrongs have only the same power over virtue as a cloud over the sun!


91
We should consider not what is likely to happen but what can happen .


90
By craving much we lost all.
he things that are indispensable require no elaborate pains to acquire. I tis luxury that call for labor.

89
No place is yours where you are not.
87
When you commit an evil, the punishment is instantaneous, it does not wait for the hangman.

85
tHE WISE MAN makes use of evils rather than being weighed down by them. When given a poor material to work with, the wise man will sculpt the best statue that material will allow.
83
Drunkenness is nothing but a condition of purposeful insanity.
82
He who lies on a couch is no less dead then he who is hanging from a rope.
81
Nothing is more honorable than a grateful heart.
We tend not to pay attention to what we have but only to what we seek.