Seneca the Younger Quotes

The order of nature [is] that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue.

...virtue is not merely a state in conformity with the right principle, but one that implies the right principle; and the right principle in moral conduct is prudence.

Justice is happiness according to virtue.

True knowledge gives a moral standing and moral strength.

We have next to consider the formal definition of virtue.

There is no such thing as character other than the habitual action, as Mr. Aristotle told us two thousand years ago.

There must be in prudence also some master virtue.

Morality can muddle mystical understanding and virtue is only necessary in so far as it favours success. All wisdom must be encompassed in order to achieve enlightenment.

[T]here is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists . . . an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness.

Is not virtue a negation of becoming?

The vices enter into the composition of the virtues, as poisons into that of medicines. Prudence collects and arranges them, and uses them beneficially against the ills of life.

Virtue and Happiness are Mother and Daughter.

The mere abhorrence of vice is not a virtue at all.

It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.

Rightness in our choice of an end is secured by [Moral] Virtue.

All sober inquirers after truth, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue.

Good and evil are essential differences of the act of the will. For good and evil pertain essentially to the will; just as truth and falsehood pertain to the reason, the act of which is distinguished essentially by the difference of truth and falsehood (according as we say that an opinion is true or false.) Consequently, good and evil volition are acts differing in species.

Ethics without virtue is an illusion. What is the highest purpose of ethics? It is to make a person good, that is virtuous.

Moral qualities are so constituted as to be destroyed by excess and by deficiency . . .

The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.

self-preservation is the primary and only foundation of virtue.

It is not enough merely possess virtue, as if it were an art; it should be practiced.

A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong - acting the part of a good man or of a bad.

Temperance and bravery, then, are ruined by excess and deficiency, but preserved by the mean.

If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.