We should every night call ourselves to an account: What infirmity have I mastered today? What passions opposed! What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired?
Seneca The ElderRead
We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Fear often stems from our imagination rather than real threats.
This quote by Seneca The Elder highlights the tendency of humans to be overwhelmed by their fears and anxieties, which are often imaginary, rather than the actual dangers they face. It suggests that our mental and emotional suffering is frequently self-imposed, rooted in our imagination and perceptions, rather than based on concrete experiences of pain or harm.
Themes
FearImaginationRealitySufferingWisdom
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about overcoming fear, you might say, 'As Seneca the Elder said, we often suffer more from imagination than from reality.'
More from Seneca The Elder
All quotes βWe can be thankful to a friend for a few acres or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.
Seneca The ElderRead
True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing.
Seneca The ElderRead
The sun also shines on the wicked.
Seneca The ElderRead
Let us be brave in the face of adversity.
Seneca The ElderRead
The courts of kings are full of people, but empty of friends.
Seneca The ElderRead
Similar quotes
Those who wish to appear learned to fools, appear as fools to the learned.
QuintilianRead
I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn't understand it then, but now, now I understand it.
Paul AusterRead
Maybe the fear is that we are less than we think we are, when the actuality of it is that we are much much more.
Jon Kabat-ZinnRead
Would that the simple maxim, that honesty is the best policy, might be laid to heart; that a sense of the true aim of life might elevate the tone of politics and trade till public and private honor become identical.
Margaret FullerRead
Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.
Ralph Waldo EmersonRead
People get out ahead of themselves in debt with spending on all of their desires. But if you learn to live pretty simply and well, well under your means, you feel incredibly, incredibly rich, and that frees you up and gives you the option to start something new, to leave the job you're not excited about, where there might be a glass ceiling on you.
Chris SaccaRead