Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"In his moral treatise, De Brevitate Vitae("On the Shortness of Life"), the Stoic philosopher Seneca explored ways to change our experience of time so as to get more enrichment from the present, to diminish regret for the past and anxiety about the future, and to make our lives feel long even though death might cut them short at any moment. As he famously said, "it is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. ... Life is...

"En su vehemente ensayo Sobre la ira, Séneca, célebre pensador romano del siglo i de nuestra era y una de las figuras más destacadas del estoicismo, argumenta que la ira es la pasión más destructiva para la raza humana. Su propia vida es una prueba de ello: apenas pudo conservarla bajo el reinado del colérico emperador Calígula y la perdió bajo el gobierno de Nerón. Esta nueva traducción es una certera selección de la sabiduría esencial...

To give and receive well may be the most human thing you can do―but it is also the closest you can come to divinity. So argues the great Roman Stoic thinker Seneca (c. 4 BCE–65 CE) in his longest and most searching moral treatise, “On Benefits” (De Beneficiis). James Romm’s splendid new translation of essential selections from this work conveys the heart of Seneca’s argument that generosity and gratitude are among the most important of...

"A philosophy that saw self-possession as the key to an existence lived 'in accordance with nature', Stoicism called for the restraint of animal instincts and the severing of emotional ties. These beliefs were formulated by the Athenian followers of Zeno in the fourth century BC, but it was in Seneca (c. 4 BC - AD 65) that the Stoics found their most eloquent advocate. Stoicism, as expressed in the Letters, helped ease pagan Rome's transition to Christianity,...