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by
Seneca
Most people, Paulinus, complain that life is too short. To these bitter folk, life hurtles by like a runaway mare, so fast and furious that it is impossible to discern its meaning before it is too late.
The problem, Paulinus, is not that we have a short life, but that we waste time.
the time we are given is not brief, but we make it so. We do not lack time; on the contrary, there is so much of it that we waste an awful lot.
“The amount of life we truly live is small. For our existence on Earth is not Life, but merely Time.”
How can anyone complain that no one will give them time when they allot no time for themselves?
In protecting their wealth men are tight-fisted, but when it comes to the matter of time, in the case of the one thing in which it is wise to be parsimonious, they are actually generous to a fault.
What stubborn denial of mortality to delay dreams to after your fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to plan on starting your life at a point that not everyone gets to.
The god-like Augustus, a man whom Fortune blessed more than any other, never stopped praying for rest and to gain release from public affairs; everything he spoke about always got back to this topic – his desire for a peaceful life.
When he had cut out these ulcers together with the limbs themselves, others would grow in their place; just as in a body that had a surfeit of blood, there was always a rupture somewhere.
Cicero said that he was “half a prisoner.” But, truthfully, the wise man will never stoop to such a term, never will he be half a prisoner – he who possesses an undiminished and stable liberty, being free and his own master, towers over all others. For what can possibly be above a man who has mastered his life and is thus above Fortune?
It would be a waste of time to list more individuals who, though others perceived them to be the happiest of folk, have articulated their hatred for everything they ever did, and with their own lips have damned their own lives for having been wasted. But why complain? Such pointless railing changed neither themselves nor anyone else. Besides, when these types finish venting, they typically fall back into their usual routine.
The time you have, the experience of which is relative, although of course it feels like it is rushing away, by definition escapes from you quickly; because you don’t grab it firmly enough, you neither hold back nor cause to delay the fastest moving thing in the world. You let it slip away as if it were something unimportant that could easily be replaced.
the mind, when its focus is split, absorbs little in depth and rejects everything that is, so to speak, jammed into it.
We all rush through life torn between a desire for the future and a weariness of the present.
Fate will dole out the remainder of a man’s time as she chooses. A man’s past is forever set in stone.
A grey-haired wrinkled man has not necessarily lived long. More accurately, he has existed long.
You have been occupied while life hurtled past you. Meanwhile the grim reaper is knocking on your door, and, like it or not, you must let him in.
The greatest obstacle to living a full life is having expectations, delaying gratification based on what might happen tomorrow which squanders today.
Life is divided into three parts: what was, what is and what shall be. Of these three periods, the present is short, the future is doubtful and the past alone is certain.
It makes no difference how much of it you have, if there is no foundation, time will seep out through the chinks and holes of the mind.
A head of state tarnishes the reputation of good Romans with such vulgar spectacle. Do condemned men not already fight to the death? Is that not enough? Must they now be crushed alive by monsters?
The only really leisured people are those who devote time to acquiring true knowledge rather than trivia. Such people are not content to live ‘in the moment’ exclusively but show a keen awareness of history, of all the years that have gone before them and they know that the amount of time they have left is uncertain and finite.
Unless we are complete ingrates, the lives of all those men that preceded us should be seen as sacred. Their collective existence paved the way for our own time on Earth.
They say ‘you can’t choose your parents,’ that they have been given to us by chance; but the good news is we can choose to be the sons of whomever we desire. There are many respectable fathers scattered across the centuries to choose from. Select a genius and make yourself their adopted son.
Honors, statues and all other mighty monuments to man’s ambition carved in stone will crumble but the wisdom of the past is indestructible.
The Philosopher alone is unfettered by the confines of humanity. He lives forever, like a god. He embraces memory, utilizes the present and anticipates with relish what is to come. He makes his time on Earth longer by merging past, present and future into one.
Everything we have is by chance and the higher up in life you go, the greater the fall is that awaits you.
The world of commerce is not that sophisticated, and there are lesser men perhaps better suited to such jobs.
Often it is better to hide an illness from the patient, because just the mere awareness of a disease can bring about death.
So next time you see a man enjoying success, a minor celebrity, say, don’t feel jealous of him; he has paid for his position with a large chunk of his time. He will have expended a lot of his days to have his name known for maybe a year or so.
Seneca was forced to commit suicide as punishment for being part of a conspiracy to assassinate Nero. Seneca was one of the most influential men in Rome at the time of his death. Today he remains a very popular author from the ancient world, known for his eloquent elucidations of the Hellenistic philosophy of Stoicism in his Letters and Consolations.
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
I, Claudius
It seems that imprisoning him in the cauldron of scattered knowledge that was Corsica with more than one excellent tutor at his disposal was the design of none other than Fate herself in order to give the world one of its greatest exponents of this fascinating and enduring branch of Greek philosophy. Seneca is one of Stoic philosophy’s most widely read and beloved writers, second only perhaps to Marcus Aurelius, author of the immortal Meditations.
Sotion was a Greek from Egypt, who had mastered Pythagoreanism deep in the bowels of the famous library at Alexandria, the Google of the ancient world.
Indeed, it is fair to say that the two most enduring Stoic texts are Meditations and Seneca’s Epistulae Moralis. Both works remain immensely popular in 2015, not just read by students but by people the world over seeking an answer to the eternal question, “How should I best live my life?”
