Stoic quotes on time

Thus it is: we do not receive a short life, but we make it a short one, and we are not poor in days, but wasteful of them.

Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time.

It is that people live as though they would live for ever: you never remember your human frailty; you never notice how much of your time has already gone by: you spend it as though you had an abundant and overflowing store of it, though all the while that day which you devote to some man or to some thing is perhaps your last.

What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily?

Therefore, my dear Lucilius, begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.

Show me that the good in life does not depend upon life’s length, but upon the use we make of it; also, that it is possible, or rather usual, for a man who has lived long to have lived too little.

And thou wilt give thyself relief if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last…

A life is really long if it is a full life…

Short is the little which remains to thee of life. Live as on a mountain.

It is not possible to live well today unless one thinks of it as his last.

Whither are you looking, whither are you stretching forward? everything future is uncertain: live now straightway.

I am endeavouring to live every day as if it were a complete life.

Even if we paid strict attention, life would soon get ahead of us; but as we are now, life finds us lingering and passes us by as if it belonged to another, and though it ends on the final day, it perishes every day.

For every day a little of our life is taken from us; even when we are growing, our life is on the wane.