What we all suffer from in today's modern world is that we don't have enough time to do all our work. After a while, we get so caught up in this hustle and bustle that we don't even think to question what we're striving for or whether it's really worth the effort.

Time

"Would you like to know how they do not live long? See how keen they are to live long."

"But life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present and fear the future."

We spend our lives procrastinating on good things, and we end up as someone who regrets the things he/she didn't do in time.

Postpone

"You are living as if destined to live forever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don't notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply - though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire."

How should we live? It is a question we rarely ask ourselves. I think everyone should find the answer to this question for themselves.

Living

"... learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die"

"So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long."

"No one will bring back the years; no one will restore you to yourself. Life will follow the path it began to take, and will neither reverse nor check its course. It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly. As it started out on its first day, so it will run on, nowhere pausing or turning aside. What will be the outcome? You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that."

"Call to mind what work you have achieved in such a long life; how many have plundered your life when you were unaware of your loses; how much you have lost through groundless sorrow, foolish joy, greedy desire, the seductions of society; how little of your own was left to you. You will realize that you are dying prematurely."

"Life divided into three periods; past, present and future. Of these, the present is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain....The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today."

An excellent book for reflection on life, time and virtue from the ancient Stoic philosopher Seneca.

"Written as a moral essay to his friend Paulinus, Seneca's ... words still pack a powerful punch two thousand years later. With its brash rejection of materialism, conventional lifestyles and groupthink, [the book] is as relevant as ever."--Back cover.

philosophy

Philosophy

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

books

Books

Life is long if you know how to use it. From the author of Letters From A Stoic (Epistulae Moralis), comes another brilliant, timeless guide to living well. Written as a moral essay to his friend Paulinus, Seneca's biting words still pack a powerful punch two thousand years later. With its brash rejection of materialism, conventional lifestyles and group-think, On The Shortness of Life is as relevant as ever. Seneca anticipates the modern world. It's a unique expose of how people get caught up in the rat race and how for those stuck in this mindset, enough is never enough. The 'busy' individuals of Rome Seneca makes reference to, those people who are too preoccupied with their careers and maintaining social relationships to fully examine the quality of their lives, sound a lot like ourselves. Includes biographical sketch 'Seneca The Stoic.'

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (often known simply as Seneca or Seneca the Younger); ca. 4 BC – 65 AD) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was tutor and later advisor to emperor Nero, who later forced him to commit suicide for alleged complicity in the Pisonian conspiracy to have him assassinated.

Seneca

On The Shortness of Life

On the Shortness of Life

When i started reading this book i had no idea that i was going to encounter something so stunning. Although the book is not very long (like 100 pages) its content contain very deep meanings and makes you think about life, time, mercy, hope, freedom and evilness on every single page.

About the Book

Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurologist">neurologist</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychiatrist">psychiatrist</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher">philosopher</a>, writer, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_survivors">Holocaust survivor</a>. He was the founder of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logotherapy">logotherapy</a>, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life's meaning as the central human motivational force.

About the Author

In 1942, just nine months after his marriage, Frankl and his family were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. His father died there of starvation and pneumonia. In 1944, Frankl and the surviving members of his family were transported to Auschwitz, where his mother and brother were murdered in the gas chambers. His wife died later of typhus in Bergen-Belsen. Frankl spent three years in four concentration camps.

The author tells about his own experiences in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp">Nazi concentration camps</a> over the years in from a psychotherapist's and a human being's point of view in this book. The author explains what this book contains with these words;

Content

"This book does not claim to be an account of facts and events but of personal experiences, experiences which millions of prisoners have suffered time and again. It is the inside story of a concentration camp, told by one of its survivors. This tale is not concerned with the great horrors, which have already been described often enough (though less often believed), but with the multitude of small torments. In other words, it will try to answer this question: How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?"

The author loses everything that he has when they bring him to the camp. Soldiers separate him from his wife, brother, sister and parents. For a long time, he didn't even know if they were alive or not. Soldiers confiscated the scientific works he had been working on all his life and destroyed them.After losing everything including his purpose of life, how can a man continue to live without losing hope?

Meaning & Purpose

"While we were waiting for the shower, our nakedness was brought home to us: we really had nothing now except our bare bodies—even minus hair; all we possessed, literally, was our naked existence"

Walking for hours on icy roads with torn shoes, being flogging while working all day long on extreme conditions, eating a bowl of soup and a piece of bread and witnessing people die one by one every day. In these conditions can a man still have mercy for another prisoner and help him or does he do everything to survive?

Mercy

There were men in camp called 'Capos'. They were privileged people chosen inside of the prisoners. They were people that never hungry, never worked. Although they were chosen from prisoners often they were harder on the prisoners than were the guards, and beat them more cruelly than the SS men did.Someone who has been oppressed for a long time was becoming more ruthless than those who had oppressed themselves when power had taken over.

Evilness

After suffering for a very long time, most people begin a state of indifference towards everything. For these people, life loses its meaning and purpose. There are two things that people who fall into this situation do in the camps; either waiting for death by doing nothing or committing suicide by running to electrical wires.

Indifference

"The prisoner who had lost faith in the future his future was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay. Usually it began with the prisoner refusing one morning to get dressed and wash or to go out on the parade grounds. No entreaties, no blows, no threats had any effect. He just lay there, hardly moving. He simply gave up. There he remained, lying in his own excreta, and nothing bothered him anymore."

After Viktor Frankl lived for a long time in different camps, he is not giving up but he kinda accepts his destiny. He accepts his fate by saying that he refuses to do so to an officer who offers to stay here by deleting his name from a list where he will probably be taken to be killed on the pretext of being transferred to a better place. But they do take him to a better place, and it turns out that after he left the camp, the whole camp burned down and all of his friends died.

Destiny

"And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate."

"The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life."

"...we could say that most men in a concentration camp believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners"

"When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden. "

This book shows that even if in extreme situations there is always hope and something to fight for.

A prominent Viennese psychiatrist before the war, Viktor Frankl was uniquely able to observe the way that he and other inmates coped with the experience of being in Auschwitz. He noticed that it was the men who comforted others and who gave away their last piece of bread who survived the longest - and who offered proof that everything can be taken away from us except the ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances. The sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision and not of camp influences alone. Only those who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp's degenerating influence - while those who made a victory of those experiences turned them into an inner triumph. Frankl came to believe that man's deepest desire is to search for meaning and purpose. This outstanding work offers us all a way to transcend suffering and find significance in the art of living.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

A prominent Viennese psychiatrist before the war, Viktor Frankl was uniquely able to observe the way that he and other inmates coped with the experience of being in Auschwitz. He noticed that it was the men who comforted others and who gave away their last piece of bread who survived the longest - and who offered proof that everything can be taken away from us except the ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances. The sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision and not of camp influences alone. Only those who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp's degenerating influence - while those who made a victory of those experiences turned them into an inner triumph. Frankl came to believe that man's deepest desire is to search for meaning and purpose. This outstanding work offers us all a way to transcend suffering and find significance in the art of living.

Viktor Emil Frankl M.D., Ph.D., was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor. Frankl was the founder of logotherapy, which is a form of Existential Analysis, the "Third Viennese School" of psychotherapy.His book Man's Search for Meaning (first published under a different title in 1959: From Death-Camp to Existentialism. Originally published in 1946 as Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager) chronicles his experiences as a concentration camp inmate and describes his psychotherapeutic method of finding meaning in all forms of existence, even the most sordid ones, and thus a reason to continue living. He was one of the key figures in existential therapy.

Viktor E. Frankl

Man's Search for Meaning

Man's Search For Meaning

Lucius Annaeus Seneca and also known simply as Seneca, was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and the advisor of the Rome's King Neron.The works written about stoicism are known as often present the school of thought in hypothetical terms, however, Seneca's this essay focuses on constructive and practicable advice.

Quotes From "On the Firmness of the Wise Man"

"There is nothing on earth so sacred as not to be liable to sacrilege; yet holy things exist on high none the less because there are men who strike at a greatness which is far above themselves, though with no hope of reaching it. The invulnerable is not that which is never struck, but that which is never wounded."

That such a wise man is invulnerable against all injury;it matters not,therefore,how many darts be hurled at him,since he can be pierced by none of them.Just as the hardness of some stones is impervious to steel,and adamant can neither be cut,broken,or ground,but blunts all instruments used upon it;just as some things can't be destroyed by fire,but when encircled by flame still retain their hardness and shape;just as some tall projecting cliffs break the waves of the sea,and though lashed by them through many centuries,yet show no traces of their rage; even so the mind of the wise man is firm

"... and fortune can take nothing away save what she gave. Now fortune does not give virtue; therefore, she does not take it away. Virtue is free, inviolable, not to be moved, not to be shaken, and so hardened against misfortunes that she cannot be bent, let alone overcome by them. She looks unfalteringly on while tortures are being prepared for her; she makes no change of countenance, whether misery or pleasure be offered to her. The wise man therefore can lose nothing of whose loss he will be sensible, for he is the property of virtue alone, from whom he never can be taken away."

"Under the direction of that destroyer of so many cities, walls may be shaken by the stroke of the ram, lofty towers may be suddenly brought low by galleries and hidden mines, and mounds arise so high as to rival the highest citadel, yet that no siege engines can be discovered which can shake a well-established mind."

" I see rich men who have lost their estates; lustful men who have lost their loves, the courtesans whom they cherished at the cost of much shame; ambitious men who have lost the senate, the law courts, the places set apart for the public display of men's vices; usurers who have lost their account-books, in which avarice vainly enjoyed an unreal wealth; but I possess everything whole and uninjured. See then, Serenus, that the perfect man, full of human and divine virtues, can lose nothing; his goods are surrounded by strong and impassable walls."

"He therefore who is affected by insult shows that he possesses neither sense nor trustfulness; for he considers it certain that he is scorned, and this vexation affects him with a certain sense of degradation, as he effaces himself and takes a lower room; whereas the wise man is scorned by no one, for he knows his own greatness, gives himself to understand that he allows no one to have such power over him, and as for all of what I should not so much call distress as uneasiness of mind, he does not overcome it, but never so much as feels."

"He will not rise in his own esteem if a beggar pays his court to him, and he will not think it an affront if one of the dregs of the people does not return his greeting. So also he will not admire himself even if many rich men admire him; for he knows that they differ in no respect from beggars—nay, are even more wretched than they; for beggars want but a little, whereas rich men want a great deal."

"He will not, then, be moved by an insult from any man for though all men differ one from another, yet the wise man regards them all as alike on account of their equal folly; for should he once lower himself to the point of being affected by either injury or insult, he could never feel safe afterwards, and safety is the especial advantage of the wise man, and he will not be guilty of showing respect to the man who has done him an injury by admitting that he has received one, because it necessarily follows that he who is disquieted at any one's scorn would value that person's admiration."

"Epicurus says that injuries may be endured by the wise man, we say that they do not exist for him...We do not deny that it is an unpleasant thing to be beaten or struck, or to lose one of our limbs, but we say that none of these things are injuries...You ask what difference there is between them? All that there is between two very brave gladiators, one of whom conceals his wound and holds his ground, while the other turns round to the shouting populace, gives them to understand that his wound is nothing, and does not permit them to interfere on his behalf."

"...since those who are most eager to offer affronts are least able to endure them"

" As for insults, offensive language, marks of disgrace, and such-like disfigurements, he ought to bear them as he would bear the shouts of the enemy, and darts or stones flung from a distance, which rattle upon his helmet without causing a wound; while he should look upon injuries as wounds, some received on his armour and others on his body, which he endures without falling or even leaving his place in the ranks. Even though you be hard pressed and violently attacked by the enemy, still it is base to give way; hold the post assigned to you by nature."

In this book; There are so many thoughts that can guide us about life, virtue and how to have a strong character. As a beginner philosophy reader, i have compiled some ideas that i think can shape human life with my own references.

"On the Firmness of the Wise Man" by Seneca (translated by Aubrey Stewart). Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

On the Shortness of Life

Man's Search For Meaning

On the Firmness of the Wise Man

Ahmet Ülkü