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If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich.

Seneca

Source
Letters to Lucilius, 16.7, trans. Richard Gummere
Written
c. AD 62–65

About this quotation

Here Seneca contrasts what a person actually needs with what other people’s opinions make them want. Natural needs are limited and easily met; wants shaped by opinion have no limit, so they can never be satisfied. The wording is Richard Gummere’s 1917 Loeb translation, which is in the public domain.

More from this author

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.
SenecaLetters to Lucilius, 2.6, trans. Richard Gummere
Set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands.
SenecaLetters to Lucilius, 1.1, trans. Richard Gummere
We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
SenecaLetters to Lucilius, 13.4, trans. Richard Gummere

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Men are disturbed, not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.
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Nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul.
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