#notesonreading

Excerpts from Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life that I will surely revisit again in the future:

• It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.

• Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well.

• So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.

• You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.

• Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man; yet there is nothing which is harder to learn. But learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die.

• Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who spends all his time on his own needs, who organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day. For what new pleasures can any hour now bring him? He has tried everything, and enjoyed everything to repletion.

• So the life of the philosopher extends widely: he is not confined by the same boundary as are others. He alone is free from the laws that limit the human race, and all ages serve him as though he were a god. Some time has passed: he grasps it in his recollection. Time is present: he uses it. Time is to come: he anticipates it. This combination of all times into one gives him a long life.

• But life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.

• There will always be causes for anxiety, whether due to prosperity or to wretchedness. Life will be driven on through a succession of preoccupations: we shall always long for leisure, but never enjoy it.

• We are born under circumstances that would be favourable if we did not abandon them. It was nature’s intention that there should be no need of great equipment for a good life: every individual can make himself happy. External goods are of trivial importance and without much influence in either direction: prosperity does not elevate the sage and adversity does not depress him. 

• If you regard your last day not as a punishment but as a law of nature, the breast from which you have banished the dread of death no fear will dare to enter.

• In any situation in life you will find delights and relaxations and pleasures if you are prepared to make light of your troubles and not let them distress you. So you have to get used to your circumstances, complain about them as little as possible, and grasp whatever advantage they have to offer: no condition is so bitter that a stable mind cannot find some consolation in it.

• We should also make ourselves flexible, so that we do not pin our hopes too much on our set plans, and can move over to those things to which chance has brought us, without dreading a change in either our purpose or our condition.