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Letters to Lucilius

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium

Seneca·c. 63–65 CE·Latin

About this text

124 letters to a younger friend, each one a short essay on how to live. Written in Seneca's last years, they are the most personal and readable texts in the Stoic tradition.

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal 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.

Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.

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