Hardship and Happiness (Ad Marciam De consolatione, Ad Helviam matrem De consolatione, De Consolatione ad Polybium, De Brevitate Vitæ, De Constantia Sapientis, De Tranquillitate Animi, De Otio, De Vita Beata, De Providentia)

by Seneca

It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it’s been given to us in generous measure for accomplishing the greatest things, if the whole of it is well invested. But when life is squandered through soft and careless living, and when it’s spent on no worthwhile pursuit, death finally presses and we realize that the life which we didn’t notice passing has passed away.

just so our lifetime offers ample scope to the person who maps it out well.

Many who have no consistent goal in life are thrown from one new design to another by a fickleness that is shifting, never settled and ever dissatisfied with itself.

“Scant is the part of life in which we live.”3 All the rest of existence is not living but merely time.

But you never thought fit to look on yourself or to listen to yourself. And so you’ve no reason to expect a return from anyone for those attentions of yours, since you offered them not because you wanted another’s company but because you were incapable of communing with yourself.

(3) Look back and recall when you were ever sure of your purpose;

You waste time as if it comes from a source full to overflowing, when all the while that very day which is given over to someone or something may be your last.

In reality, your life, even if you live a thousand years and more, will be compressed into the merest span of time; those vices of yours will swallow up any number of lifetimes. To be sure, this span of time, which good management prolongs even though it naturally hurries on, must in your case escape you quickly; for you fail to seize it and hold it back, and you do nothing to delay that speediest of all things, but you allow it to pass as if it were something overabundant that we can get back again.

no one area of activity can be successfully pursued by someone who is preoccupied

the distracted mind takes in nothing really deeply but rejects everything that is, so to speak, pounded into it.

learning how to live takes a whole lifetime, and—you’ll perhaps be more surprised at this—it takes a whole lifetime to learn how to die.

Believe me, it’s the mark of a great man, and one rising above human weakness, to allow no part of his time to be skimmed off.

“I’ve no chance to live.” (7) Of course you don’t! All those who engage you in their business disengage you from yourself. How many days did that defendant of yours take from you? How many that candidate? Or that old lady, wearied as she is by burying her heirs? Or that character who feigns illness to excite the greed of legacy hunters? Or that powerful friend who holds on to you not for true friendship but for show? Check off, I say, and review the days of your life: you’ll see that very few of them, and those the worthless ones, have stayed in your possession.

Everyone sends his life racing headlong and suffers from a longing for the future, a loathing of the present. (9) But the person who devotes every second of his time to his own needs and who organizes each day as if it were a complete life neither longs for nor is afraid of the next day.