On the Shortness of Life, Life is Long if You Know How to Use It

They are not at leisure whose pleasures involve a serious

commitment.

For example, nobody will dispute that those people are busy about nothing who spend their time on useless literary studies: even among the Romans there is now a large company of these.

It used to be a Greek failing to want to know how many oarsmen Ulysses had, whether the Iliad or the Odyssey was written first, and whether too they were by the same author, and other questions of this kind, which if you keep them to yourself in no way enhance your private knowledge, and if you publish them make you appear more a bore than a scholar.

-Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, Life is Long if You Know How to Use It

Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger, On the Shortness of Life, transl. C. D. N. Costa, Penguin Books – Great Ideas, New York, 2005

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