Seneca
“Everything is alien to us; time alone is ours.”
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter I
Omnia… aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est.
Documented source
Attribution
Seneca
Source
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter I
Omnia… aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est.
In full
“Everything is alien to us; time alone is ours.”
Status
Public domain in the United States
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About this line
Still in that first letter, Seneca lays out the ledger: everything else can be taken from you — money, status, the roof over your head — and so none of it was ever really yours. Time is the one thing you own outright — and the one most people hand over without a second thought.
Why we carry this line
Time is the only thing that was ever actually yours, and it’s the thing people give away most freely. We should all embrace every second. That’s worth wearing.
The design
Set in Roman capitals, the way Latin was cut into stone. The small dots are interpuncts, the marks Roman stonecutters carved between words.
Objects carrying this line
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