Letter 1

Do just this, my Lucilius: lay claim to yourself for yourself, and the time that until now was either being taken from you, or filched, or slipping away, gather up and keep. Convince yourself that what I write is the truth: some of our hours are torn from us, some quietly withdrawn, some simply run off. Yet the most shameful loss is the one that comes through carelessness. And if you care to notice, the greatest part of life passes while we are doing wrong, a great part while we are doing nothing, the whole of life while we are doing something other than we should.

Show me anyone who sets some price upon his time, who reckons the worth of a day, who understands that he is dying daily. For in this we are deceived, that we look ahead to death; much of it has already gone by. Whatever span of life lies behind us, death holds it. So do, my Lucilius, what you write that you are doing: lay hold of every hour. Thus it will come about that you hang less upon tomorrow, if you set your hand upon today. While it is being put off, life races by.

Everything, Lucilius, belongs to others; time alone is ours. Nature has put us in possession of this one fleeting and slippery thing, from which she expels whoever wishes. And so great is the folly of mortals that they let the smallest and cheapest things, things at any rate replaceable, be charged to their account once they have got them, while no one who has received the gift of time judges that he owes anything for it, though this is the one thing that not even the grateful can repay.

You will ask, perhaps, what I myself do, who lay these precepts upon you. I will confess frankly: what happens with a man who is extravagant yet careful, my account of expenditure balances. I cannot say that I waste nothing, but I can say what I waste, and why, and how; I will render the reasons for my poverty. But it has befallen me as it does most of those reduced to want through no fault of their own: everyone forgives them, no one comes to their aid.

What then? I do not count that man poor to whom the little that is left is enough. Still, I would rather you kept your own, and you will be making a good start in time. For, as our forefathers held, frugality comes too late when you are at the bottom of the jar. For not only the least remains at the bottom, but the worst. Farewell.