Waste No More Time Arguing About

From Book 10 of the Meditations, written during the last years of Marcus Aurelius's reign as he fought the Marcomannic Wars on the northern frontier. The urgency reflects a man acutely aware of his own mortality - he would die in 180 AD, likely of plague, at a military camp near modern Vienna. The sentiment echoes Seneca's insistence in the Letters to Lucilius that philosophy must be lived, not merely debated.