The Shortness of Life: Seneca on Busyness and the Art of Living Wide Rather Than Living Long
#seneca #philosophy #life #time #today #present
“The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today… The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”
Here some good excerpts of the Seneca thoughts and advise remarked in the article:
"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 invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing.
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… Life is long if you know how to use it."
"The man who … organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day…"
"The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately."
"Of all people only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only those are really alive. For they not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but they annex every age to theirs."
"We are in the habit of saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents who were allotted to us, that they were given to us by chance.
But we can choose whose children we would like to be.
There are households of the noblest intellects: choose the one into which you wish to be adopted, and you will inherit not only their name but their property too. Nor will this property need to be guarded meanly or grudgingly: the more it is shared out, the greater it will become. These will offer you a path to immortality and raise you to a point from which no one is cast down.
This is the only way to prolong mortality — even to convert it to immortality."
You really should read this great article from Brainpicking at whole, here:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/01/seneca-on-the-shortness-of-life/
May it be useful.
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