Life is not short but we waste it
~3 mins read
“Think of yourself as dead. Now take what’s left, and live it properly.” Marcus Aurelius
On the Shortness of Life
The whole wisdom and beauty of the world is here to be explored,
and to expand your life beyond your time.
It is a small part of life we really live
a wasted life, even if it lasts more than a thousand years, will shrink into the tiniest span
how alarmed would you be if you only a few years ahead, and how carefully would they use them!
you may have even less time in reality
Life is divided into three periods, past, present and future. Of these, the present is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain. For this last is the one over which Fortune has lost her power, which cannot be brought back to anyone’s control.
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
Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future
What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.
Life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.
No one will bring back the years; no one will restore you to yourself. Life will follow the path it began to take, and will neither reverse nor check its course. It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly.
What is doomed to fall delights no one. So it is inevitable that life will be not just very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil.
They achieve what they want laboriously; they possess what they have achieved anxiously; and meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return. New preoccupations take the place of the old, hope excites more hope and ambition more ambition.
All the greatest blessings create anxiety, and Fortune is never less to be trusted than when it is fairest.
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.
Seneca