Seneca the Younger Quotes

Mortality defines the human condition.

Life is strewn with so many dangers, and can be the source of so many misfortunes, that death is not the greatest of them.

Look how men live, always precariously balanced between good and bad fortune.

Life and death were so unpredictable. So close to each other. We existed moment to moment, never knowing who would be the next to leave this world.

We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse.

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

Human life is beyond comprehension.

No one is so old that he cannot live yet another year, nor so young that he cannot die today.

Everybody's human. You are only on this planet for a little bit of time.

Alas! it is not till time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life to light the fires of passion with from day to day, that man begins to see that the leaves which remain are few in number.

Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.

If in the least particular, one could derange the order of nature, who would accept the gift of life?

Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.

Throughout this life, you can never be certain of living long enough to take another breath.

We are none of us promised anything but the last breath we take.

This earthly existence of ours is more brittle that the glass bangles that ladies wear.

God help us! it is a foolish little thing, this human life, at the best; and it is half ridiculous and half pitiful to see what importance we ascribe to it, and to its little ornaments and distinctions.

[H]appy or miserable, life is the only blessing which man possesses[.

Life is but a day; A fragile dewdrop on its perilous way From a tree's summit.

We like to think of life as a constant ... Yet it can be ended in a heartbeat.

He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience.

... life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind, a meaningless accident, a microsecond of carelessness, and it's out. Forever.

Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.

Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal—there's the trick!

Birth, and copulation, and death; that's all the facts when you come to brass tacks.