In this collection of Stoic quotes about how life is short, the ancient Stoics and other great thinkers remind us that we don't have a great deal of time on earth to do the things we need and want to do. Despite this, though, it's all too easy to spend one's time wasting hours, years, or even decades in ways that don't help us fulfill our purposes.
If the realization that life is short is troubling to you, don't fret! With the help of Stoic philosophy, we can learn to seize the day and lead virtuous, good lives free from the fear of death.
We all act like money is the most important resource, but as Jim Rohn says, "you can get more money, but you cannot get more time." Every night we go to sleep, we're one day closer to death. Though it might seem harsh if you've never really tapped into that idea, this realization can have a revolutionary impact on your life.
"This body is not a home, but an inn; and that only for a short time."
– Seneca the Younger
"Every man's life lies within the present; for the past is spent and done with, and the future is uncertain."
– Marcus Aurelius
"In man's life, time is but a moment; being, a flux; sense is dim; the material frame corruptible; soul, an eddy of breath; fortune a thing inscrutable, and fame precarious."
– Marcus Aurelius
"The part of life which we really live is short."
– Seneca the Younger
"Life, if thou knowest how to use it, is long enough."
– Seneca the Younger
"I am not eternity, but a man; a part of the whole, as an hour is of the day."
– Epictetus
"Tota vita nihil aliud quam ad mortem iter est.
The whole of life is nothing but a journey to death."– Seneca the Younger
"Our life is what our thoughts make it. Do every act of your life as if it were your last. In a word, your life is short. You must make the most of the present with the aid of reason and justice. Since it is possible that you may be quitting life this very moment, govern every act and thought accordingly."
– Marcus Aurelius
"Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing."
– Seneca the Younger
"When thou art above measure angry, bethink thee how momentary is man's life."
– Marcus Aurelius
"Spend your brief moment according to nature's law, and serenely greet the journey's end as an olive falls when it is ripe, blessing the branch that bare it, and giving thanks to the tree that gave it life."
– Marcus Aurelius
"Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man - yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it."
– Marcus Aurelius
"Remember that even if you were to live for three thousand years, or thirty thousand, you could not lose any other life than the one you have, and there will be no other life after it. So the longest and the shortest lives are the same. The present moment is shared by all living creatures, but the time that is past is gone forever. No one can lose the past or the future, for if they don't belong to you, how can they be taken from you?"
– Marcus Aurelius
"While the fates permit, live happily; life speeds on with hurried step, and with winged days the wheel of the headlong year is turned."
– Seneca the Younger
"Every instant of time... is a pinprick of eternity."
– Marcus Aurelius
"It's not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it."
– Seneca the Younger
"Deem not life a thing of consequence. For look at the yawning void of the future, and at that other limitless space, the past."
– Marcus Aurelius
"Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time."
– Jim Rohn
"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."
– Henry David Thoreau
"Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them."
– Dion Boucicault
"A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is."
"Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand - and melting like a snowflake."
– Francis Bacon
Are you expecting to live the life you really want to live someday when you retire? Are you waiting to start that business when the timing is perfect? Take a tip from the Stoics and recognize that life is passing us by all the while.
"While we are postponing, life speeds by."
– Seneca the Younger
"We are always complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end to them."
– Seneca the Younger
"It's not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it."
– Seneca the Younger
“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.”
– Seneca the Younger
"It is a tedious thing to be always beginning life; they live badly who always begin to live."
– Seneca the Younger
"If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary."
– Epictetus
“The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.”
– Seneca the Younger
"It is extreme evil to depart from the company of the living before you die."
– Seneca the Younger
"From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now, you are at the Olympic games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. This is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be Socrates."
– Epictetus
“Remember how long you’ve been putting this off, how many extensions the gods gave you, and you didn’t use them. At some point you have to recognize what the world it is that you belong to; what power rules it and from what source you spring; that there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return.”
– Marcus Aurelius
"The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."
– Jack London
"One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living."
– Dale Carnegie
"Don't wait. The time will never be just right."
– Napoleon Hill
"Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone."
– Pablo Picasso
"Lost time is never found again."
– Benjamin Franklin
"If you are not ready today, you will be even less so tomorrow."
– Ovid
"He who awaits much can expect little."
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"We are always getting ready to live but never living."
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
In modern society, we don't seem to like talking about death very much. The truth is, though, that the reality of death is one of the few things we all really have in common. No matter how much money you make in life, how famous you are, how loved you are, or how powerful you are, you're going to die just like someone with no money, no fame, no loved ones, and no power.
Though it might seem morbid to think of death, meditating on death can actually help you realize just how finite our time is. You might find that this is precisely the fuel you need to start living the life you want to live.
"You are a little soul carrying around a corpse."
– Epictetus
"You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think."
– Marcus Aurelius
"The hour which gives us life begins to take it away."
– Seneca the Younger
"Let us prepare our minds as if we'd come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life's books each day... The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time."
– Seneca the Younger
"When you die, it will not be because you are sick, but because you were alive."
– Seneca the Younger
“You are living as if destined to live forever; 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…
How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!”
– Seneca the Younger
"Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough."
– Seneca the Younger
“Suppose that a god announced that you were going to die tomorrow “or the day after.” Unless you were a complete coward you wouldn’t kick up a fuss about which day it was–what difference could it make? Now recognize that the difference between years from now and tomorrow is just as small.”
– Marcus Aurelius
"Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardship of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die."
– Seneca the Younger
"Life is never incomplete if it is an honorable one. At whatever point you leave life, if you leave it in the right way, it is whole."
– Seneca the Younger
"Death is something inevitable. When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace."
– Nelson Mandela
"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important."
– Steve Jobs
"To fear death is nothing other than to think oneself wise when one is not. For it is to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not even turn out to be the greatest blessings of human beings. And yet people fear it as if they knew for certain it is the greatest evil."
– Socrates
"The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead."
– Albert Einstein
"Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself."
– Leo Tolstoy
It's scary to think about how much time we spend thinking about the past and imagining the future, all while the actual moments of our lives go by. The Stoics frequently remind us that the present moment is the time when we can take care of the things that are in our control.
"Stop drifting…Sprint to the finish. Write off your hopes, and if your well-being matters to you, be your own savior while you can."
– Marcus Aurelius
"They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn."
– Seneca the Younger
"Now is the time to get serious about living your ideals. Once you have determined the spiritual principles you wish to exemplify, abide by these rules as if they were laws, as if it were indeed sinful to compromise them. Don't mind if others don't share your convictions. How long can you afford to put off who you really want to be? Your nobler self cannot wait any longer."
– Epictetus
"True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is 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."
"If you separate from . . . everything you have done in the past, everything that disturbs you about the future . . . and apply yourself to living the life that you are living-that is to say, the present-you can live all the time that remains to you until your death in calm, benevolence, and serenity."
– Marcus Aurelius
"The true felicity of life is to be free from anxieties and perturbations; to understand and do our duties to God and man, and to enjoy the present without any serious dependence on the future."
– Seneca the Younger
"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment."
– Henry David Thoreau
"Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed."
– Wayne Dyer
"The moment is the sole reality."
– Karl Jaspers
"Forever is composed of nows."
– Emily Dickinson
"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year."
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
"One today is worth two tomorrows."
– Benjamin Franklin
Now, let's take a look at some Stoic quotes about grabbing the day by the horns and really living with purpose.
"Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life."
– Seneca the Younger
"Whatever can happen at any time can happen today."
– Seneca the Younger
"Do every act of your life as if it were your last."
"Every day, therefore, should be regulated as if it were the one that brings up the rear, the one that rounds out and completes our lives."
– Seneca the Younger
"To live each day as though one's last, never flustered, never apathetic, never attitudinizing - here is the perfection of character."
– Marcus Aurelius
“What would have become of Hercules do you think if there had been no lion, hydra, stag or boar – and no savage criminals to rid the world of? What would he have done in the absence of such challenges? Obviously he would have just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep. So by snoring his life away in luxury and comfort he never would have developed into the mighty Hercules. And even if he had, what good would it have done him? What would have been the use of those arms, that physique, and that noble soul, without crises or conditions to stir into him action?”
– Epictetus
"No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such."
– Marcus Aurelius
“Concentrate every minute like a Roman – like a man – on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can – if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you.”
– Marcus Aurelius
"Plunge boldly into the thick of life, and seize it where you will, it is always interesting."
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Seize the day, and put the least possible trust in tomorrow."
– Horace
"Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out."
– Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
"Seize the day. Because, believe it or not, each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die."
– Robin Williams
"You will never 'find' time for anything. If you want time, you must make it."
– Charles Buxton
"Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you."
– Annie Dillard
"Go for it now. The future is promised to no one."
– Wayne Dyer
One of the ideas that comes up a number of times in Stoic writing is the fact that it's not the length of your life that matters but what you do with your life. You'll find that Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and others frequently comment about duty and purpose in life.
When we look inside ourselves and figure out what our purposes are, it can completely change our relationship with life. Not only can it help free you from the fear of death, but it can also give you motivation and drive in your daily life that is otherwise hard to come by.
"What we do now echoes in eternity."
“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?’"
– Marcus Aurelius
"Remember this - that there is a proper dignity and proportion to be observed in the performance of every act of life."
– Marcus Aurelius
"Let men see, let them know, a real man, who lives as he was meant to live."
– Marcus Aurelius
"So you were born to feel ‘nice’? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?"
– Marcus Aurelius
"Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around."
– Marcus Aurelius
"What if we choose not to do the things we are supposed to do? The principal gain is a sense of an authentic act - and an authentic life. It may be a short one, but it is an authentic one, and that's a lot better than those short lives full of boredom. The principal loss is security. Another is respect from the community. But you gain the respect of another community, the one that is worth having the respect of."
– Joseph Campbell
"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well."
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Make your work to be in keeping with your purpose."
– Leonardo da Vinci
"Your purpose in life is to find your purpose and give your whole heart and soul to it."
– Gautama Buddha
"The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere."
– Michel de Montaigne
When people don't let themselves fully live, what is holding them back? Often times it's a fear of some kind, the most common of which might be the fear of death.
Are we more interested in leading long lives, though, or interesting, virtuous, good lives? Do we want to look back at our lives and see all of the opportunities we passed over simply because we were afraid?
The Stoics are experts at explaining why it's not worth being afraid of death and that getting rid of this fear can have a seriously positive impact on your life.
"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live."
– Marcus Aurelius
"You want to live-but do you know how to live? You are scared of dying-and, tell me, is the kind of life you lead really any different from being dead?"
– Seneca the Younger
"Stop whatever you're doing for a moment and ask yourself: Am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do this anymore?"
– Marcus Aurelius
"The act of dying is one of the acts of life."
– Marcus Aurelius
"The more you live in the present moment, the more the fear of death disappears."
– Eckhart Tolle
"When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home."
– Tecumseh
"The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time."
– Mark Twain
Though the shortness of life might be a bit distressing, the truth is realizing this can actually be quite freeing. It can help you connect with just how beautiful life is while also reminding you to appreciate where you are, what you have, and who you're with at the moment.
"Try to live the life of the good man who is more than content with what is allocated to him."
– Marcus Aurelius
"Try to enjoy the great festival of life with other men!"
– Epictetus
"Each day provides its own gifts."
– Marcus Aurelius
"Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them."
– Marcus Aurelius
"Remember that very little is needed to make a happy life."
– Marcus Aurelius
"Learn to enjoy every minute of your life. Be happy now. Don't wait for something outside of yourself to make you happy in the future. Think how really precious is the time you have to spend, whether it's at work or with your family. Every minute should be enjoyed and savored."
– Earl Nightingale
"Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens."
– Khalil Gibran
"Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from."
– Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
"The happiest people do not necessarily have the best things. They simply appreciate the things they have."
– Warren Buffett
For more thought-provoking quotes from the greatest minds in history on dozens of topics, be sure to check out our Stoic Quotes blog.
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