3/19/21
I recently read a wonderful little book – On the Shortness of Life by Seneca.
This is one book that has stayed by my bedside since then.
In this, Seneca, the Stoic philosopher and playwright, offers us an urgent reminder on the non-renewability of our most important resource: our time.
It is a required reading for anyone who wishes to live to their full potential, and it is a manifesto on how to get back control of your life and live it to the fullest.
Here are a few passages from the book that serve as great reminders on, well, *the shortness of life*
“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 body’s needs are few: it wants to be free from cold, to banish hunger and thirst with nourishment; if we long for anything more we are exerting ourselves to serve our vices, not our needs.”
“And so there is no reason for you to think that any man has lived long because he has grey hairs or wrinkles, he has not lived long – he has existed long.
Don’t squander time, you have a right to be be frugal & stingy with it.
Stay blessed forever.