Finished reading: On the Shortness of Life by Seneca 📚

I

we do not receive a short life, but we make it a short one, and we are not poor in days, but wasteful of them.

III

men covetously guard their property from waste, but when it comes to waste of time, they are most prodigal of that which it would become them to be sparing.

You fear everything, like the mortals as you are, and yet you desire everything as if you were immortals.

are you not ashamed to reserve only the leavings of your life for yourself, and appoint for the enjoyment of your own right mind only that time which you cannot devote to any business? How late it is to begin life just when we have to be leaving it!

IV

fortune collapses by its own weight, without any shock or interference from without.

VII

for nothing can take deep root in a mind which is directed to some other subject, and which rejects whatever you try to stuff into it.

but one’s whole life must be spent in learning how to live, and , which may perhaps surprise you more, one’s whole life must be spent in learning how to die.

Every man hurries through his life, and suffers from a yearning for the future, and a weariness of the present:

VIII

Indeed, if the number of every man’s future years could be laid before him, as we can lay that of his past years, how anxious those who found that they had but few years remaining would be to make the most of them?

IX

Life is divided into three parts: that which has been, that which is, and that which is to come: of these three stages, that which we are passing through is brief, that which we are about to pass is uncertain, and that which we have passed is certain:

Our present consists only of single days, and those, too, taken one hour at a time

so in this fast and never-ceasing journey of life, which we make at the same pace whether we are asleep or awake, busy people never notice that they are moving till they are at the end of it.

XVIII

for some diseases must be cured without the patient’s knowledge: many have died through discovering what was the matter with them.

XX

Yet many are of the same mind: they retain their wish for labour longer than their capacity for it, and fight against their bodily weakness; they think old age an evil for no other reason than because it lays them on the shelf.

no one keeps death well before his eyes, no one refrains from far-reaching hopes.