Seneca on Anger

"Anger carried to excess begets madness." How true this is you're bound to know, having had both slaves and enemies. It is a passion, though, which flares up against all types of people. It is born of love as well as hate, and is as liable to arise in the course of sport or jesting as in affairs of a serious kind. The factor that counts is not the importance of the cause from which it springs but the kind of personality it lands in, in the same way as with fire what matters is not the fierceness of the flame but where it catches - solid objects may resist the fiercest flame while, conversely, dry and inflammable matter will nurse a mere spark into a conflagration. It is true, my dear Lucilius. The outcome of violent anger is a mental raving, and therefore anger is to be avoided not for the sake of moderation but for the sake of sanity.

Seneca translated by Campbell, Robin. Letters from a Stoic. New York: Penguin Books, 2004, 69.

Gregory B. Sadler presents Seneca on Anger

 Alain de Botton offers a shorter presentation

Stoic Saturday: Seneca on Personal Resolutions

Making noble resolutions is not as important as keeping the resolutions you have made already.

Seneca. Letters from a Stoic. "Letter XVI." London: Penguin Books, 2004, 63.

Stoic Saturday: Seneca on Friendship and Lovers

To come back to the question, the wise man, self-sufficient as he is, still desires to have a friend if only for the purpose of practising friendship and ensuring that those talents are not idle. Not, as Epicurus put it in the same letter, 'for the purpose of having someone to come and sit beside his bed when he is ill or come to his rescue when he is hard up or thrown into chains,' but so that on the contrary he may have someone by whose sick bed he himself may sit or whom he may himself release when that person is held prisoner by hostile hands. Anyone thinking of his own interests and seeking out friendship with this in view is making a great mistake. Things will end as they began; he has secured a friend who is going to come to his aid if captivity threatens: at the first clank of a chain that friend will disappear. These are what are commonly called fair-weather friendships. A person adopted as a friend for the sake of his usefulness will be cultivated only for so long as he is useful. This explains the crowd of friends that clusters about successful men and the lonely atmosphere about the ruined - their friends running away when it comes to the testing point; it explains the countless scandalous instances of people deserting or betraying others out of fear for themselves. The ending inevitably matches the beginning: a person who starts being friends with you because it pays him will similarly cease to be friends because it pays him to do so. If there is anything in a particular friendship that attracts a man other than the friendship itself, the attraction of some reward or other will counterbalance that of the friendship. What is my object in making a friend? To have someone to be able to die for, someone I may follow into exile, someone for whose life I may put myself up as security and pay the price as well. The thing you describe is not friendship but a business deal, looking to the likely consequences, with advantage as its goal. There can be no doubt that the desire lovers have for each other is not so very different from friendship - you might say it was friendship gone mad. Well, then, does anyone ever fall in love with a view to a profit, or advancement, or celebrity? Actual love in itself, heedless of all other considerations, inflames people's hearts with a passion for the beautiful object, not without hope, too, that the affection will be mutual. How then can the nobler stimulus of friendship be associated with any ignoble desire?

Seneca. Letters from a Stoic. "Letter IX." London: Penguin Books, 2004, 49-50.

Seneca's Stance on Soft Living

No Mister Softee for him

Soft living imposes on us the penalty of debility; we cease to be able to do the things we've long been grudging about doing.  

Seneca. Letters from a Stoic. London: Penguin Books, 2004, 106.

Retirement Plans

[Y]ou should neither be like the bad because they are many, nor be an enemy of the many because they are unlike you. Retire into yourself as much as you can. Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those whom you are capable of improving. 

Seneca. Letters from a Stoic. London: Penguin Books, 2004, 43