Seneca the Younger Quotes on Time
Few ancient writers thought as searchingly about time as Seneca, and the quotes gathered here, drawn from his Letters to Lucilius, return repeatedly to its value and its waste. Seneca's complaint is that almost no one treats time as precious: he asks for a single person who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily. Time slips away while we postpone living, and it is squandered by aimless busyness and restless travel, since whoever is everywhere is nowhere. Yet Seneca does not preach ceaseless work; he grants that the mind needs leisure for study and renewal. The recurring lesson is to take deliberate possession of one's own time, since it is the one thing genuinely ours to lose.
Quotes
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“While we are postponing, life speeds by.”
Letters to Lucilius, 1 -
Attributed to Seneca the Younger:
“Our care should not be to have lived long, but to have lived enough.”
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Attributed to Seneca the Younger:
“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.”
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“It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough.”
Moral Essays | De Brevitate Vitae ("On the Shortness of Life", trans. John W. Basore), Ch. 1 -
“Who is everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends .”
Letter II: On discursiveness in reading | Line 2. -
“The much occupied man has no time for wantonness, and it is an obvious commonplace that the evils of leisure can be shaken off by hard work.”
Letter LVI: On quiet and study | Line 9 -
“No man can suffer both severely and for a long time; Nature, who loves us most tenderly, has so constituted us as to make pain either endurable or short.”
Letter LXXVIII: On the Healing Power of the Mind -
“What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily?”
Letter I: On Saving Time -
“Here, Seneca uses the same observation that Sallust made regarding friendship (in his historical account of the Catilinarian conspiracy, Bellum Catilinae [XX.4]) to define wisdom.”
Letter XX: On practicing what you preach -
“Would you know what makes men greedy for the future? It is because no one has yet found himself.”
Letter XXXII: On Progress -
“The mind must be indulged, and leisure must be given from time to time, which is the place of food and strength.”
Dialogi de Tranquillitate Animi(Concerning Peace of Mind)