'Can anything be more idiotic than certain people who boast of their foresight? They keep themselves officiously preoccupied in order to improve their lives: they spend their lives in organising their lives. They direct their purposes with an eye to a distant future. But putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune's control and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately' - Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, page 13 of the Penguin Great Ideas edition (trans. C.D.N. Costa).
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