Reading List
What a beautiful line by Ruskin Bond
Book Bytes - Seneca on the shortness of life
Finished reading: On the Shortness of Life by Seneca 📚
One of the most profound books ever! Also, one of the shortest. At around 11000 words, takes about a couple of hours or so to read.
This is one the those Antifragile books. One that has truly stood the test of time. Written 2 millenia ago by a roman stoic philosopher who’s life was indeed a tale worth telling.
Here are a few snippets from the book to read and reflect.
It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested.
The part of life we really live is small. For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time.
So desirable a thing did leisure seem that he anticipated it in thought because he could not attain it in reality
There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn
The fairest day in hapless mortals’ life Is ever first to flee.
I hear that one of these pampered people—provided that you can call it pampering to unlearn the habits of human life—when he had been lifted by hands from the bath and placed in his sedan-chair, said questioningly: “Am I now seated?
They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Personally, I also feel it resonates closely with the perfect Yogic wisdom of revered scripture Srimad Bhagavad Gita.
If you read only one thing this weekend, let it be this great book!