On the Shortness of Life Quotes

“Your sort live as if you’re going to live forever, your own human frailty never enters your head, you don't keep an eye on how much time has passed already. 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. You're like ordinary mortals in fearing everything, you're like immortals in coveting everything. You'll hear many say:
"After my fiftieth year I'll retire to a life of leisure; my sixtieth year will bring release from all my duties." And what guarantee, may I ask, do you have that your life will last longer? Who will allow those arrangements of yours to proceed according to plan? Are you not ashamed to keep for yourself only the remnants of your existence, and to allocate to philosophical thought only that portion of time which can't be applied to any business? How late it is to begin living just when life must come to an end! What foolish obliviousness to our mortality to put off wise plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to want to begin life from a point that few have reached!”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“[W]e do not receive a short life, but we make it a short one, and we are not poor in days, but wasteful of them . . . We live only a small part of our lives.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“[A] person's life comes to an end just as they are preparing to enjoy it.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“Some time has passed? He holds it in recollection. Time is upon us? He uses it. Time is to come? This he anticipates. The combining of all times into one makes his life long.
But for those who forget the past, disregard the present, and fear for the future, life is very brief and very troubled. When they reach the end of it, they realize too late, poor wretches, that they've been busied for so long in doing nothing.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“Lives such as yours—how true it is!—though they should exceed
a thousand years, will contract into the smallest span: but those vices
of yours will swallow up any amount of time. This length of time you
have, that reason prolongs, however swift nature makes its sojourn,
is bound to pass quickly through your fingers; for you do not grasp
it, or seek to hold on to it, or try to delay the passing of the swiftest
thing of all, but allow it to depart, as if it were something surplus to
requirement and easily replaced.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life