Seneca · Letters to Lucilius
Letter 1: On saving time
Letter 1 opens the collection with a reckoning of time: most of life slips away in doing wrong, doing nothing, or doing something beside the point.
Seneca counts his own losses and treats time as the single thing that belongs to us, a loan nobody can give back.
From the letter
Furthermore, if you will pay close heed to the problem, you will find that the largest portion of our life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing, and the whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose.
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, Lucilius, do as you write me that you are doing: hold every hour in your grasp.
Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s.
We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession.
Quotes checked against this letter
Coverage
Our editions hold 30 letters of 124 in Richard Mott Gummere’s translation (1917–1925); 29 of them have a page here, those that Joseph Baillard’s French translation (1861) also contains.
Seneca and Epictetus are in Stoic+ — 3 passages of this letter, each with its reference; Marcus Aurelius is free in the app.