Seneca the Younger Quotes

Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.

When you prepare for something, it's like jumping into cold water, but you're prepared. You jump in. And you start swimming, or if you don't swim, you drown.

It was inevitable for people to try to create a sense of normalcy in a place where nothing was normal. It helped one get through the day, to add predictability to a life that was inherently unpredictable.

Misfoutune always comes to those who wait. The trick is to find happiness in the breif gaps between distaters.

It is a waste of time to be angry about my disability. One has to get on with life and I haven't done badly. People won't have time for you if you are always angry or complaining.

People learned to live with the most unimaginable things.

The point is, this is a way to help inoculate me about what has come and is coming.

A man's wits are better employed in bearing up under the misfortunes that lie upon him at present than in foreseeing those that may come upon him hereafter.

Therefore, since the world has still Much good, but much less good than ill, And while the sun and moon endure Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure, I'd face it as a wise man would, And train for ill and not for good.

He had regrets, of course, but not so many that he would lose any sleep over them. Life surprised him now and then and he didn't much care for surprises, unless he was passing them out. But - what was to be done? You had to deal with the reality, he had learned that over the years, no matter how much you didn't like it

In family life people almost always adjust themselves to misfortune. They make a bed of it and hope makes them accept that bed, however hard it is.

I moved around a lot as a kid, and when you're always entering new places at that age, you kind of have to learn how to adapt yourself, and I felt a really powerful way to do that was to make people laugh.

You don't get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks.

If I always appear prepared, it is because before entering an undertaking, I have meditated long and have foreseen what might occur. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly and secretly what I should do in circumstances unexpected by others; it is thought and preparation

Instead of giving in to the greatest misfortune that can happen at my age, deafness, I busy myself in searching out all possible compensations, and I apply myself much more to all the amusements that are here within my grasp.

I have to do what I'm doing at the time. That's the most important thing. You might lose some people along the way, and you might gain other people on the way, that's just the way it is. But nevertheless, if you're driven by something, there is no argument about it; that's what you have to do.

In reality, you don’t ever change the hurricane. You just learn how to stay out of its path.

There's more people that like me than there are who hate me, so I kind of brush it off.

it's amazing what you can get used to.

A man wants to walk across the land, but the earth is covered with thorns. He has two options - one is to pave his road, to tame all of nature into compliance. The other is to make sandals. Making sandals is the internal solution...it does not base success on a submissive world or overpowering force, but on intelligent preparation and cultivated resilience.

One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once, life would collapse. There are simply no definitive answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

People are training for success when they should be training for failure.

I am courageous at the decisive moment. But I need a good deal of start-up time, and I try to take as much as possible into consideration beforehand.

I guess there are some things you never get used to.

We must make the best of those ills which cannot be avoided.