Seneca On The Shortness Of Life : Seneca : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

...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.

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. If these people want to know... See more

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.

People trifle with the most precious commodity of all; and it escapes their notice because it's an immaterial thing that doesn't appear to the eyes, and for that reason it's valued very cheaply-or rather, it has practically no value at all.

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. The greatest impediment to living is expectancy, which relies on tomorrow and wastes today.

Believe me, it's the mark of a great man, and one rising above human weakness, to allow no part of his time to be skimmed off. Accordingly, such a person's life is extremely long because he's kept available for himself the whole of whatever amount of time he had. None of it lay fallow and uncultivated, and none of it was under another's control; fo... See more

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 ... They lose the day in looking forward to the night, the night in fear of the dawn.