Quote checked against the text
“While we are postponing, life speeds by.” — attributed to Seneca
Yes. The sentence is in the text, at Letters to Lucilius, 1, §2; Richard Mott Gummere’s 1917–1925 edition is quoted below.
Yes. “While we are postponing, life speeds by” closes the second section of Letter 1, On saving time, in Gummere’s translation (1917–1925), exactly as it circulates. The sentence before it gives the instruction it depends on: lay hold of today’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow’s.
The letter opens the collection and the whole of it is about time as the only thing that is ours. Some moments are torn from us, some are gently removed, others glide beyond our reach, and the most disgraceful kind of loss is the one due to carelessness. Seneca then admits, in the same letter, that he keeps account of his own expenditure of time like a man of expensive habits who at least knows what he spends.
This is one of the letters we hold in Gummere’s text, 30 of the 124, so the check goes to the line. The full letter is at Letter 1.
What we searched
Each fragment is searched, normalized, in every file of the editions below. The block is the search and its result, replayed at each build.
The wording was searched in the 30 letters of Gummere’s translation (1917–1925) we hold, out of 124, and in the ten dialogues we have from Stewart’s 1889 volume.
$ node tools/seo/grep-quote.mjs --lang en "while we are postponing" "life speeds by"
George Long, 1862 — Meditations · 12 books, 487 chapters (1 file)
"while we are postponing" 0 hits
"life speeds by" 0 hits
Richard Mott Gummere, 1917–1925 — Letters to Lucilius · 30 letters of 124 (30 files)
"while we are postponing" 1 hit
letter-01.txt l. 14 …much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds…
"life speeds by" 1 hit
letter-01.txt l. 14 …we are postponing, life speeds by.
Aubrey Stewart, 1889 — Minor Dialogues · 10 dialogues, 6 aligned with Baillard chapter for chapter (10 files)
"while we are postponing" 0 hits
"life speeds by" 0 hits
Elizabeth Carter, 1758 — Enchiridion · 52 chapters (Carter’s numbering) (1 file)
"while we are postponing" 0 hits
"life speeds by" 0 hits
George Long, 1877 — Discourses (selection) and Enchiridion · a selection of the Discourses, without book or chapter numbers, plus the Enchiridion (1 file)
"while we are postponing" 0 hits
"life speeds by" 0 hits
$ node tools/seo/grep-quote.mjs --lang fr "qu'on la diffère" "la vie passe en courant" "tandis qu'on l'ajourne"
Auguste Couat, 1904 — Pensées · 12 books, 487 chapters (IV, 19–20 and VII, 47–48 merged by the translator) (12 files)
"qu'on la diffère" 0 hits
"la vie passe en courant" 0 hits
"tandis qu'on l'ajourne" 0 hits
Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, 1876 — Pensées · 12 books, 487 chapters — second French edition, shown beside Couat (12 files)
"qu'on la diffère" 0 hits
"la vie passe en courant" 0 hits
"tandis qu'on l'ajourne" 0 hits
Joseph Baillard, 1861 — Lettres à Lucilius · 29 letters of 124 (29 files)
"qu'on la diffère" 0 hits
"la vie passe en courant" 0 hits
"tandis qu'on l'ajourne" 1 hit
lettre-01.txt l. 7 …t’assures bien d’aujourd’hui. Tandis qu’on l’ajourne, la vie…
Joseph Baillard, 1861 — Dialogues et traités · 11 works, 6 aligned with Stewart chapter for chapter (11 files)
"qu'on la diffère" 0 hits
"la vie passe en courant" 0 hits
"tandis qu'on l'ajourne" 0 hits
Jean-Marie Guyau, 1875 — Manuel · 53 chapters (modern numbering) (1 file)
"qu'on la diffère" 0 hits
"la vie passe en courant" 0 hits
"tandis qu'on l'ajourne" 0 hits
Victor Courdaveaux, 1862 — Entretiens · 9 chapters of the Discourses (I, 1 · I, 15 · I, 18 · I, 24 · I, 25 · II, 13 · II, 18 · III, 16 · III, 24) (9 files)
"qu'on la diffère" 0 hits
"la vie passe en courant" 0 hits
"tandis qu'on l'ajourne" 0 hitsThis sentence appears 4 times in the list of circulating quotes we collected on 2026-08-09.
What the text says
Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by.
How to cite
The passage, in the edition quoted above:
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 1, §2 (trans. Richard Mott Gummere, 1917–1925)
Other sentences checked
All sentences attributed to SenecaAll quote checks
Every passage in Stoïque carries its reference. The 171 passages of Seneca are in Stoic+, each with its locator.