Seneca the Younger Quotes on Time
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, commonly known as Seneca the Younger, was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist of the first century. This page collects quotes attributed to Seneca the Younger on the topic of time, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
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)