It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it’s been given to us in generous measure for accomplishing the greatest things, if the whole of it is well invested. But when life is squandered through soft and careless living, and when it’s spent on no worthwhile pursuit, death finally presses and we realize that the life which we didn’t notice passing has passed away.
All the rest of existence is not living but merely time.
You’ll find no one willing to distribute his money; but to how many people each of us shares out his life! Men are thrifty in guarding their private property, but as soon as it comes to wasting time, they are most extravagant with the one commodity for which it’s respectable to be greedy.
When your mind was free from disturbance; what accomplishment you can claim in such a long life; how many have plundered your existence without your being aware of what you were losing; how much time has been lost to groundless anguish, foolish pleasure, greedy desire, the charms of society; how little is left to you from your own store of time. You’ll come to realize that you’re dying before your time.
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?
To sum up, everyone agrees that no one area of activity can be successfully pursued by someone who is preoccupied—rhetoric cannot, nor can the liberal arts—since the distracted mind takes in nothing really deeply but rejects everything that is, so to speak, pounded into it.
Such a person’s life is extremely long because he’s kept available for himself the whole of whatever amount of time he had.
All those who engage you in their business disengage you from yourself.
But the person who devotes every second of his time to his own needs and who organizes each day as if it were a complete life neither longs for nor is afraid of the next day.
You’ll see them ready to spend all they have to stay alive. So great is the conflict in their feelings.
They form their purposes with the distant future in mind. Yet the greatest waste of life lies in postponement: it robs us of each day in turn, and snatches away the present by promising the future.
All that’s to come lies in uncertainty: live right now.
“Why are you holding back?” he says. “Why are you slow to action? If you don’t seize the day, it slips away.”
None of these philosophers will force you to die, but all will teach you how.
There is a common saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents we were allotted, and that they were given to us by chance; yet we can be born to whomever we wish.
But for those who forget the past, disregard the present, and fear for the future, life is very brief and very troubled.
But the time of actual enjoyment is short and fleeting, and made far shorter by their own fault; for they desert one pleasure for another and cannot persist steadily in any one desire. Their days aren’t long but hateful; yet, on the other hand, how short seem the nights that they spend cavorting with prostitutes or drinking!
Everything that comes our way by chance is unsteady, and the higher our fortunes rise, the more susceptible they are to falling.
Reasons for anxiety will never be wanting, whether because of prosperity or wretchedness. Life will be driven on through one preoccupation after another; we shall always pray for leisure but never attain it.
The plight of all preoccupied people is wretched, but most wretched is the plight of those who labor under preoccupations that are not even their own, whose sleep schedule is regulated by somebody else’s, who walk at somebody else’s pace, and who are under instructions in that freest of all activities—loving and hating.