On the Shortness of Life

by Seneca

It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it.

You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed.

You will hear many men saying: "After my fiftieth year I shall retire into leisure, my sixtieth year shall release me from public duties." And what guarantee, pray, have you that your life will last longer? Who will suffer your course to be just as you plan it? Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnant of life, and to set apart for wisdom only that time which cannot be devoted to any business? How late it is to begin to live just when we must cease to live! What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to postpone wholesome plans to the fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained!

everybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is busied with many things — eloquence cannot, nor the liberal studies — since the mind, when its interests are divided, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it.

he who bestows all of his time on his own needs, who plans out every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the morrow.