On the Shortness of Life (Penguin Great Ideas)

We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.

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.

Life is divided into three periods, past, present and future. Of these, the present is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain.

Realized that your grief should not be intruded upon while it was fresh and agonizing, in case the consolations themselves should rouse and inflame it: for an illness too nothing is more harmful than premature treatment.