“We learn not in the school, but in life.”

“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”

“Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.”

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters. 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.

While we wait for life, life passes. 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. 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.

“Nothing is more honorable than a grateful heart.”

Count your years and you’ll be ashamed to be wanting and working for exactly the same things as you wanted when you were a boy. Of this one thing make sure against your dying day – that your faults die before you do. Have done with those unsettled pleasures, which cost one dear – they do one harm after they’re past and gone, not merely when they’re in prospect. Even when they’re over, pleasures of a depraved nature are apt to carry feelings of dissatisfaction, in the same way as a criminal’s anxiety doesn’t end with the commission of the crime, even if it’s undetected at the time. Such pleasures are insubstantial and unreliable; even if they don’t do one any harm, they’re fleeting in character. Look around for some enduring good instead. And nothing answers this description except what the spirit discovers for itself within itself. A good character is the only guarantee of everlasting, carefree happiness. Even if some obstacle to this comes on the scene, its appearance is only to be compared to that of clouds which drift in front of the sun without ever defeating its light.

True happiness is to understand our duties toward God and man; to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence on the future; not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears, but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is abundantly sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not. It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor. Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using them not because we needed them but because we had them. If you live in harmony with nature you will never be poor; if you live according what others think, you will never be rich.

Nothing is ours, except time. You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply – though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire. The geat blessing of mankind are within us and within our reach; but we shut our eyes, and like people in the dark, we fall foul upon the very thing we search for, without finding it. Preserve a sense of proportion in your attitude to everything that pleases you, and make the most of them while they are at their best.

“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.”

For what prevents us from saying that the happy life is to have a mind that is free, lofty, fearless and steadfast – a mind that is placed beyond the reach of fear, beyond the reach of desire, that counts virtue the only good, baseness the only evil, and all else but a worthless mass of things, which come and go without increasing or diminishing the highest good, and neither subtract any part from the happy life nor add any part to it? A man thus grounded must, whether he wills or not, necessarily be attended by constant cheerfulness and a joy that is deep and issues from deep within, since he finds delight in his own resources, and desires no joys greater than his inner joys.

There is no easy way from the earth to the stars. It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness. Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body. It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable. The mind that is anxious about future events is miserable. If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person. Associate with people who are likely to improve you. It’s not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It’s because we dare not venture that they are difficult. Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.

Life is slavery if the courage to die is absent. He who is brave is free. All cruelty springs from weakness. We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality. It is difficult to bring people to goodness with lessons, but it is easy to do so by example. Cling tooth and nail to the following rule: not to give in to adversity, not to trust prosperity, and always take full note of fortune’s habit of behaving just as she pleases.

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”

“It’s not years nor days, but the mind, that determines that we’ve lived enough.”

“As long as you live, keep learning how to live.”

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~Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger usually known mononymously as Seneca, was a Stoic philosopher of Ancient Rome, a statesman, dramatist, and in one work, satirist, from the post-Augustan age of Latin literature.

Excerpts from On the Shortness of Life, Letters from a Stoic, Epistles.

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