Stoic quotes about time

Every passage below is an exact excerpt, checked word for word against the public-domain translation it comes from: Aubrey Stewart’s Seneca (1889), and George Long’s Marcus Aurelius (1862) and Epictetus (1877). An ellipsis (…) marks words left out, and square brackets mark words Long supplied. Under each passage is a short note on what it means in an ordinary week. A time quote often credited to Marcus that he never wrote, and a few genuine lines in borrowed wording, are sorted at the end.

Seneca: we don’t lack time, we waste it

Seneca made the classic Stoic argument about time in a short essay, On the Shortness of Life, addressed to Paulinus, the official who ran Rome’s grain supply. The core of its case fits in two passages.

Seneca starts from the complaint everyone makes, that life is too short, and turns it down. The amount was never the trouble; the handling is. His last sentence says it plainly: “we are not poor in days, but wasteful of them” (On the Shortness of Life 1). Notice the verb in Stewart’s English: the time “glided away.” Seneca isn’t describing a dramatic loss. He means the evening that disappeared into a phone, or the year that went to a job you meant to leave after six months. The waste is quiet, which is why it is so easy to keep doing.

The second passage names the habit that does most of the wasting. Postponement “takes away the present by promising something hereafter” (On the Shortness of Life 9). The promise always sounds reasonable: after this deadline, once the kids are older, when things calm down at work. Seneca’s objection comes in the next sentence: you dispose of what is “in the hand of Fortune” and let go of what is in your own. His closing words, “live now straightway,” are about today, not about a better-organized version of next year.

He makes the same case in the first of his Letters to Lucilius: in our paraphrase, nothing is truly ours except time, so hold on to every hour (Letter 1).

More from On the Shortness of Life →

Marcus Aurelius on time and the present

Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations in Greek as private notes to himself, and time is one of the subjects he returns to most. His concern is mostly scale: how fast things pass, how small one life is against the whole of time, and how little of time is ever in our hands.

Time is like a river

That is the whole entry. In Long’s wording time is like a river, and the river is “made up of the events which happen” (Meditations 4.43). So it isn’t an empty clock ticking in the background. It is the stream of things that happen to you, this morning’s meeting and tonight’s argument about the dishes included. Each one is seen, carried off and replaced. Some modern translations drop the like and say flatly that time is a river, which is the version people search for. Rivers as a picture of change go back to Heraclitus, the early Greek philosopher whose physics the Stoics took as the inspiration for their own (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)).

Here the river carries everything material, and Marcus draws the practical conclusion. Whatever you are “puffed up with” or “plagued about” is in the current with everything else, and it can vex you “only for a time, and a short time” (Meditations 5.23). The promotion you are proud of and the remark you can’t stop replaying are both already moving downstream. That is no reason to stop caring about your work. It is a reason not to let either one run your week.

A point in time

“Of human life the time is a point” (Meditations 2.17). Marcus opens with the smallest measure he can find, and the list that follows is bleak on purpose: the body a stream, the soul a dream and vapor, fame followed by oblivion. Then the turn. What can steer a life that brief? “One thing, and only one, philosophy,” and the lines after it are practical: do nothing without a purpose, accept what is allotted. The bleak list clears the ground. Once you stop expecting time or reputation to last, the question left is how to spend the stretch you have.

Marcus admits the first exercise here is “vulgar,” meaning common rather than refined: think of people who clung hard to life, and notice that they are dead too. Then he widens the frame. Against the boundless time before and after, what separates “him who lives three days and him who lives three generations” (Meditations 4.50)? In a sentence this excerpt leaves out, he goes further and tells himself not to count life as a thing of value at all. You don’t have to follow him that far to use the arithmetic. If length can’t be what makes a life good, then what you do with the days matters more than how many there are, which is Seneca’s point reached from the other side.

Only the present is yours

This is Marcus at his most technical, and the last sentence is the one to keep. He narrows the field twice. Of everything about him, only the mind’s own acts are in its power; and of those, only the ones “done with reference to the present” (Meditations 6.32). Last year’s decision to take the job is now a settled fact, no more yours to change than the date on the contract. What is yours is the judgment you make about it this afternoon, and what you do next.

Three short orders that belong together. Marcus explains the first himself in 8.29: you wipe out an imagination by reminding yourself that it is in your power to keep agitation out of your mind and to see each thing for what it is. The strings are an image he uses several times for desires that jerk a person about like a puppet (2.2, 3.16, 6.16). The third order says where attention goes once the first two are done: “Confine thyself to the present” (Meditations 7.29). It draws a line around what is actually happening and keeps your attention inside it, the same move as “circumscribest” in 8.36 below.

Here the present is a relief rather than a demand. Marcus tells himself not to take on “the whole of thy life” at once (Meditations 8.36). Neither past nor future can hurt him, only the present, and the present shrinks to very little once its edges are marked. Think of the first month of a new job, or the long middle of a degree. Seen whole, it looks impossible. Seen as this morning’s work, it usually isn’t. For 8.36 as a way to handle worry, see Stoicism and worry.

Epictetus: why not today?

Epictetus says less than Marcus about time in the large and more about the day in front of you. His short discourse “On Attention” is about what it costs to let your attention lapse and promise to pick it up later.

The opening warning is the sharpest part. A lapse of attention looks like a pause you can end at will, and Epictetus says it isn’t: you won’t simply “recover it when you choose” (Discourses 4.12), and your affairs are worse for everything that follows. The middle of the excerpt sets a bar you can reach. Perfection is off the table; steady aim at it is not, and escaping “at least a few errors” counts. The last line is the one for a Sunday night: “how much better is it to do so today?” The modern case is the phone at dinner, or the plan to be more patient with your kids once the busy season ends, a season with a way of renewing itself.

For Epictetus on putting off, day after day, the point at which you start living as someone making progress (Enchiridion 51), see Stoicism and procrastination.

Time quotes to check before you share them

“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst”

This line is widely shared as Marcus Aurelius. It is not in the Meditations. It comes from William Penn, the English Quaker who founded Pennsylvania, writing some fifteen centuries after Marcus in the preface to his book of maxims Some Fruits of Solitude. Penn’s sentence is a little longer than the meme, “Time is what we want most, but what, alas! we use worst,” and it goes on to say that God will strictly reckon with us for how we used it. In Penn’s English, want could mean lack as well as desire.

It is easy to see why the line drifted to the Stoics. It says in one sentence what Seneca argues in On the Shortness of Life 1. If you want the Stoic version, quote Seneca’s, above.

Genuine, but in someone else’s words

Several real Stoic lines about time circulate in modern translations, which is why they don’t match the wording on this page:

• Not a short time, but much of it wasted. Genuine Seneca, On the Shortness of Life 1, in a modern translation. Stewart’s wording of the same sentence opens the passage at the top of this page.
• Life is long if you know how to use it. Genuine Seneca, chapter 2, and close to his Latin. Stewart’s translation adds one word, saying life is long enough; our guide to On the Shortness of Life shows the passage.
• Time as a river. Genuine Marcus, Meditations 4.43, shown above in Long’s wording.
• Time as the only thing that is truly ours. Genuine Seneca, Letters to Lucilius 1. The usual English translations of the Letters are still under copyright in many countries, so we describe the letter above rather than quote it.

To check any other line, paste it into the quote checker on our page of fake Stoic quotes.

Spend this week on purpose

Seneca’s own exercise, an audit of where a life’s years actually went, is in chapter 3 of On the Shortness of Life, and our guide to the essay turns it and two other ideas from Seneca into practices for an ordinary week. The passages from Marcus and Epictetus suggest three more.

• Pick one place to pay attention. Epictetus describes attention as a habit, built or lost a day at a time. Choose one moment that recurs this week, such as dinner, the first ten minutes at your desk or the drive home, and give it your whole attention each day, starting today rather than Monday.
• See the week at its real size. Marcus sets one life against all of time in 2.17 and 4.50. The memento mori calendar draws a life as a grid of weeks, so this week shows up as what it is, one small square among a few thousand.
• Close each day. The Evening Examination is a short nightly review: what went well, what to do better and what outside your control disturbed you. Today’s teaching opens the next morning with a passage and a practice.