Seneca the Younger Quotes

The end of all moral speculations is to teach us our duty; and, by proper representations of the deformity of vice and beauty of virtue, beget correspondent habits, and engage us to avoid the one, and embrace the other.

Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices.

I learned a lot about morality from fiction, from movies.

In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.

Nothing makes it easier to resist temptation than a proper bringing-up, a sound set of values - and witnesses.

Children may be born angels, but with all the temptations out there in the world, it takes work to try to keep them that way.

Although all the good arts serve to draw man's mind away from vices and lead it toward better things, this function can be more fully performed by this art, which also provides extraordinary intellectual pleasure.

In order to do good, a man must be good; and he will not be good except he have instruction by counsel and by example.

We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.

Here's a rule I recommend: Never practice two vices at once.

The sciences have ever been the surest guides to virtue.

Although children are good and well born, vice will blight them if they are not well educated.

Everything we do as teachers has moral overtones.

I'd like to write a series that, in an adventurous and fun way, teaches kids a way to discern between good and evil, to establish a foundation on moral absolutes.

To do right is wonderful. To teach others to do right is even more wonderful--and much easier.

If there is any better way to teach virtue than by practicing it, I do not know it.

Nothing can be more real, or concern us more, than our own sentiments of pleasure and uneasiness; and if these be favourable to virtue and unfavourable to vice, no more can be requisite to the regulation of our conduct and behavior.

The good man is the teacher of the bad, And the bad is the material from which the good may learn. He who does not value the teacher, Or greatly care for the material, Is greatly deluded although he may be learned. Such is the essential mystery.

If you're a teacher you have to teach the curriculum, all that stuff, you have to teach morals, you have to teach values, and you have to teach, all-importantly, self-control. Because a lot of kids don't have it.

Every good teaching may still end up producing evil bandits who have no principles whatsoever, an outcome even more likely when the teacher is also a bandit.

Clergymen almost necessarily fail in two ways as teachers of morals. They condemn acts which do no harm and they condone acts which do great harm.

People may talk about intellectual teaching, but what we principally want is the moral teaching.

No one is born without vices, and he is the best man who is encumbered with the least.

To expect people to be good, to be just, to be temperate, etc., without showing them how they should become so, seems like the ineffectual charity mentioned by the apostle, which consisted in saying to the hungry, the cold and the naked, be ye fed, be ye warmed, be ye clothed, without showing them how they should get food, fire or clothing.

The weak-minded man is the slave of his vices and the dupe of his virtues.