Life &/or Death – Part 1 of 3: SENECA (5 BC to 65 AD)

Dialogues and Letters

translated 1997 by C.D.N. Costa

edited & republished 2004 in a

Penguin Classics short paperback:

The Shortness of Life

selected & edited 2024 by MMB

·      Life ceases for us just when we are getting ready for it.

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

·      We are not given a short life, instead we make it short.

·      Life is long if you know how to use it.

·      A small part of a Lifetime is really lived. All the rest is not Life but merely Time.

·      You are living as if destined to live forever.

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

·      Learning how to live takes a whole lifetime, and it takes a whole lifetime to learn how to die.

·      You must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles. He has not lived long, just existed long.

·      If each of us could have a tally of his future years set before him, as we can of our past years, how alarmed we would be to see only a few years ahead, and how carefully we would use them.

·      Life is short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.

Some men have been assailed by the gloomy thought that all their labors were for the sake of an epitaph.