Seneca the Younger Quotes

To make the best use of your life, you must never forget two truths: First, compared with eternity, life is extremely brief. Second, earth is only a temporary residence. You won't be here long, so don't get too attached.

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

He is dead who called me into being, and when I shall be no more the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish.

Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.

The body is the soul's poor house or home, whose ribs the laths are and whose flesh the loam.

It is true that we are made of dust. And the world is also made of dust. But the dust has motes rising.

Your timeless self does not age and has no fear of the future. Contemplate your physical self and all its possessions, and practice laughing peacefully at it all.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

A human being is only breath and shadow.

What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.

Life is like a very short visit to a toyshop between birth and death.

A mass of dust, world's momentary slave, Is man, in state of our old Adam made, Soon born to die, soon flourishing to fade.

Time is but the shadow of the world upon the background of Eternity.

This life at best is but an inn, And we the passengers.

Tomorrow exists even though I may not exist in it.

Afterlife, in my mind, is pretty much nothing. This is it. This is what we get, for me.

It is a common saying, and in everybody's mouth, that life is but a sojourn.

That which comes and goes, rises and sets, is born and dies is the ego. That which always abides, never changes, and is devoid of qualities is the Self.

We're all just passing time and occupy our chair very briefly.

I had to make my history quick because there would be no future, merely a gossamer world blown about on the zeitgeist, till zeitgeist, the wind of the times, is blasted away by kamikaze, the wind of God.

This body is breaking down, but I am not.

Throughout much of our lives, our association with the temporary has risen. This transitory body, a sack of bones and flesh, is considered erroneously as our true body and we have accepted this temporary condition as conclusive.

When we're alive, life consumes us. But when we die, all of the color and the motion is gone so quickly, it's as though it can no longer stand to be wasted on us.

You are permanent, but this life is not.

Life is a bubble in a lake, that glitters for an instant, bursts, and leaves not even a blur on the water; it is the leap of a minnow, which sends a tiny ripple trembling for a few inches.