Category: TRANSCIENCE

  • “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.”

    —Seneca, Great Ideas On the Shortness of Life

  • “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.”

    —Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

  • It is a well-known fact that our society ignores death. It is understandable: Without God, without eternal life, without Christ, and without redemption, how can anyone bear the thought of death?

    The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise
    Cardinal Robert Sarah, Nicolas Diat

  • So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long.

    —Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

  • Now while the blood is hot you should make your way with vigor to better things. In this kind of life you will find much that is worth your study: the love and practice of the virtues, the forgetfulness of the passions, the knowledge of how to live and die, and a life of deep tranquility.

    Indeed the state of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but the most wretched are those who are toiling not even at their own preoccupations, but must regulate their sleep by another’s, and their walk by another’s pace, and obey order in those freest of all things, loving and hating. If such people want to know how short their lives are, let them reflect how small a portion is their own.

    So, when you see a man repeatedly wearing the robe of office, or one whose name is often spoken in the Forum, do not envy him: these things are won at the cost of life.

    —Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

  • Feeble old men pray for a few more years; they pretend they are younger than they are; they comfort themselves by this deception and fool themselves as eagerly as if they fooled Fate at the same time. But when at last some illness has reminded them of their mortality, how terrified do they die, as if they were not just passing out of life but being dragged out of it. They exclaim that they were fools because they have not really lived, and that if only they can recover from this illness they will live in leisure. Then they reflect how pointlessly they acquired things they never would enjoy, and how all their toil has been in vain. But for those whose life is far removed from all business it must be amply long. None of it is frittered away, none of it scattered here and there, none of it committed to fortune, none of it lost through carelessness, none of it wasted on largesse, none of it superfluous: the whole of it, so to speak, is well invested. So, however short, it is fully sufficient, and therefore whenever his last day comes, the wise man will not hesitate to meet death with a firm step.

    —Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

  • “People who write in water are engaged in drawing the shapes of the letters in the liquid by writing with the hand, but nothing remains of the shape of the letters, and the interest in the writing consists solely in the act of writing (for the surface of the water continually follows the hand, obliterating what is written). In the same way all enjoyable interest and activity disappears with its accomplishment. When the activity ceases the enjoyment too is wiped out, and nothing is stored up for the future, nor is any trace or remnant of happiness left to the pleasure takers when the pleasant activity passes away. This is what the text means when it says ‘there is no advantage under the sun’ for those who labor for such things, whose end is futility.”

    —St. Gregory of Nyssa

  • Or in surveying cities and spots of interest? All your bustle is useless. Do you ask why such flight does not help you? It is because you flee along with yourself. You must lay aside the burdens of the mind; until you do this, no place will satisfy you.

    …

    You wander hither and yon, to rid yourself of the burden that rests upon you, though it becomes more troublesome by reason of your very restlessness.

    Seneca, XXVIII. On Travel as a Cure for Discontent, Letters from a Stoic

  • “The quickest way to run out of time is to think you have enough of it.”

    —Stewart Stafford

  • Those who have not found Christ live in this life without hearty faith; they think and care more about worldly things—how to enjoy themselves, how to eat and drink pleasurably, how to dress exquisitely, how to satisfy their carnal desires, how to kill time, with which they do not know what to do, though time seeks them and, not finding them, quickly flies away before their eyes. Day flies away after day, night after night, month after month, year after year, until, finally, the last terrible hour strikes, and they hear a voice: “Stop, the course is finished; your time has been lost; your sins and iniquities have preceded you; they will fall upon you with all their power, and will crush you with their weight eternally.”

    —St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ