Time & the Present

"Don't live as though you were going to live a myriad years."

"For the present is equal for all, and what is passing is therefore equal: thus what is being lost is proved to be barely a moment."

"Then remind yourself that it is not the future or the past that weighs heavy upon you, but always the present, and that this gradually grows less, if only you isolate it and reprove your understanding, if that is not strong enough to hold out against it, thus taken by itself."

"As though you were now dead and have not lived your life up to the present moment, use the balance remaining to live henceforward according to Nature."

"Therefore to study the life of man for forty years is no different from studying it for a hundred centuries."

"You have the power to strip off many superfluities which trouble you and are wholly in your own judgement; and you will make a large room at once for yourself by embracing in your thought the whole Universe, grasping ever-continuing Time and pondering the rapid change in the parts of each object, how brief the interval from birth to dissolution, and the time before birth a yawning gulf even as the period after dissolution equally boundless."

"See that you bestow this present time upon yourself."

"We do not have a very short time assigned to us, but we lose a great deal of it: life is long enough to carry out the most important projects: we have an ample portion, if we do but arrange the whole of it aright: but when it all runs to waste through luxury and carelessness, when it is not devoted to any good purpose, then at the last we are forced to feel that it is all over, although we never noticed how it glided away."

"Those men lead the shortest and unhappiest lives who forget the past, neglect the present, and dread the future: when they reach the end of it the poor wretches learn too late that they were busied all the while that they were doing nothing."

"It is in your power to secure at once all the objects which you dream of reaching by a roundabout path, if you will be fair to yourself: that is, if you will leave all the past behind, commit the future to Providence, and direct the present, and that alone, to Holiness and Justice."

"Repeatedly dwell on the swiftness of the passage and departure of things that are and of things that come to be."

"For even that wherein we die is one of the acts of life, and so even at that moment to 'make the best use of the present' is enough."

"Present good is not yet altogether complete, some mischance may interrupt it; the future is in suspense, and uncertain; but what is past is laid up in safety."

"Remember how long you have been putting off these things, and how many times the gods have given you days of grace, and yet you do not use them."

"There is a kind of river of things passing into being, and Time is a violent torrent."

"Therefore throw all else aside, and hold fast only these few things; further calling to mind at the same time that each of us lives only in the present, this brief moment; the rest is either a life that is past, or is in an uncertain future."

"Hasten then to the goal, lay idle hopes aside, and come to your own help, if you care at all for yourself, while still you may."

"Let not the future trouble you; for you will come to it, if come you must, bearing with you the same reason which you are using now to meet the present."

"Perfection of character possesses this: to live each day as if the last, to be neither feverish nor apathetic, and not to act a part."

"Moreover, that which depends upon nature is not weakened by delay, but grief is gradually effaced by time."

"Not to speak of the graver guilt which you incur by returning evil for good, you distinctly do wrong in not waiting for the fitting time for each action, for it is as wrong to anticipate this as it is not to take it when it comes."

"And, besides, that as the sands are constantly carried over one another, hiding what went before, so in our life what was before is very swiftly hidden by what is carried after."

"Act as Nature this moment requires; set about it, if it is granted you, and don't look round to see whether any one will know."

"I am endeavouring to live every day as if it were a complete life."

"Reflect continually how all things came to pass in days gone by as they do to-day, and reflect that so they will hereafter; and put before your eyes whole dramas and scenes of the same kind, which you have known in your own experience or from earlier history, the whole court of Hadrian, for instance, or of Antoninus; of Philip, Alexander, and Croesus; for those were all like these; the actors only were different."

"Why not satisfied to pass through this brief moment ordering your ways?"

"Each hour be minded, valiantly as becomes a Roman and a man, to do what is to your hand, with precise . . . and unaffected dignity, natural love, freedom and justice; and to give yourself repose from every other imagination."

"Everywhere and continually it is in your power to be reverently content with your present circumstance, to behave to men who are present with you according to right and to handle skilfully the present impression, that nothing you have not mastered may cross the threshold of the mind."

"Call to mind by way of example the time of Vespasian: you will see everything the same: men marrying, bringing up children, falling ill, dying, fighting, feasting, trading, farming, flattering, asserting themselves, suspecting, plotting, praying for another's death, murmuring at the present, lusting, heaping up riches, setting their heart on offices and thrones."

"If you complete the present work, following the rule of right, earnestly, with all your might, with kindness, and admit no side issue, but preserve your own divinity pure and erect, as if you have this moment to restore it; if you make this secure, expecting nothing and avoiding nothing, but content with present action in accord with Nature and with heroic truth in what you mean and say, you will live the blessed life."

"Rejoice and set up your rest in one thing: to pass from act to act of fellowship, keeping God in remembrance."

"Wilt thou rather be satisfied with present circumstance and pleased with all the present, and convince thyself that all is present for thee from the gods and all is well for thee and will be well whatsoever is dear to them to give and whatsoever they purpose to bestow for the sustenance of the perfect living creature, the good and just and beautiful, which begets, sustains, includes, and embraces all things that are being resolved into the generation of others like themselves?"

"Let your imagination dwell continually upon the whole of Time and the whole of Substance, and realize that their several parts are, by comparison with Substance, a fig-seed; by comparison with Time, the turn of a gimlet."

"Accordingly we must press forward, not only because every day we are drawing nearer to death, but also because the apprehension of events and the ability to adapt ourselves to them begin to wane before the end."

"If you say to me now that you want a fig, I will answer to you that it requires time: let it flower 2 first, then put forth fruit, and then ripen."

"After a brief space of time these same men avoid their former expressions, thinking them abject, and scarcely befitting free-born men; afterwards they arrive at the same point to which, as I suppose, the worst and most ungrateful of men come-- that is, they forget."

"The sum of the matter is this: life is short; the present must be turned to profit with reasonableness and right."

"Yet do you, who are all but at the point of vanishing, give up the struggle, and that though you are one of the worthless?"

"You deserve to suffer this; so you would rather become good to-morrow than be good to-day."

"Thus it comes to pass that your nurse has hardly any influence with you, because the lapse of time has set the kindness which you received from her at so great a distance; thus it is that you no longer look upon your teacher with respect; and that now when you are busy about your candidature for the consulate or the priesthood, you forget those who supported you in your election to the quaestorship."

"Some things are hastening to be, others to have come and gone, and a part of what is coming into being is already extinct."

"Let your mind gain an entrance into what is occurring and who is producing it."

"Then pause and think: 'Where is it all now?' Smoke and ashes and a tale that is told, or not so much as a tale."

"To speak generally the difference is a small one, and this difference long-drawn-out through what great toils and with what sorts of men and in how weak a body Do not count it then as a thing . . .; for see the gulf of time behind and another infinite time in front: in this what difference is there between a three-days-old infant and a Nestor of three generations?"

"You have forgotten, moreover, ( e ) that every individual's mind is of God and has flowed from that other world, ( f ) that nothing is a man's own, but even his child, his body, and his vital spirit itself have come from that other world, ( g ) that all is judgement, ( h ) that every man lives only the present life and this is what he is losing."

"You will in general find the same things repeated up and down the world."

"There is a great difference between the beginning of a thing and its final development; the beginning is not equal to the thing at its greatest, merely upon the ground that, without the beginning, it could never have become so great."

"Just as, if one of the gods told you: 'to-morrow you will be dead or in any case the day after to-morrow', you would no longer be making that day after important any more than to-morrow, unless you are an arrant coward (for the difference is a mere trifle), in the same way count it no great matter to live to a year that is an infinite distance off rather than till to-morrow."

"So, if you separate from yourself, namely from your mind, all that others do or say, all that you yourself did or said, all that troubles you in the future, all that as part of the bodily envelope or natural spirit attaches to you without your will, and all that the external circumfluent vortex whirls round, so that your mind power, freed from the chain of necessity, lives purified and released by itself—doing what is just, willing what comes to pass, and speaking what is true; if you separate, I say, from this governing self what is attached to it by sensibility, and what of time is hereafter or has gone by, and make yourself like the sphere of Empedocles, 'Rounded, rejoicing in the solitude which is about it',[1] and practise only to live the life you are living, that is the present, then you will have it in your power at least to live out the time that is left until you die, untroubled and with kindness and reconciled with your own good Spirit."

"Perhaps a man who is really a man must leave on one side the question of living as long as he can, and must not love his life, but commit these things to God, and, believing the women's proverb that no one ever escaped his destiny, must consider, with that in his mind, how he may live the best possible life in the time that is given him to live.'"