Browse 6 quotations connecting Seneca with Procrastination, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Sources represented here include On the Shortness of Life, Moral letters to Lucilius, Moral Letters to Lucilius — Letter 1.
“Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.”
Seneca argues against postponing life into an imagined future and asks the reader to treat the present day as complete enough for deliberate living.
Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 101.
“While we are postponing, life speeds by.”
Seneca warns that postponement is itself a use of finite life: waiting for a more convenient future can become the very way the available present is lost.
Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 1, “On Saving Time,” Richard M. Gummere translation. The line follows Seneca’s advice to hold every hour and precedes his claim that nothing is truly ours except time.
“Unless you seize the day, it flees.”
The present has to be used while it is available because delay does not pause the day that is already moving away.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter IX; Basore translation, in Seneca’s attack on indefinite delay and preparation for a future life.
“They spend life in making ready to live!”
Preparation becomes self-defeating when it permanently replaces the life it was supposed to make possible.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter IX; Seneca describes people who stay busy preparing for a future life.
“Postponement is the greatest waste of life.”
Delay is costly because it exchanges a real day for a future that remains uncertain and therefore cannot be spent yet.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter IX; sentence in Seneca’s criticism of distant plans that steal the present.
“The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy, which depends upon the morrow and wastes to-day.”
Excessive dependence on tomorrow steals attention from the only time available for action, making postponement itself a way of wasting life.
On the Shortness of Life, chapter IX.
