Life & Wisdom Quote by Aulus Persius Flaccus

A dagger of a line, sharpened by the Roman talent for moral diagnosis: we don’t just worry, we spend. “Consume” makes anxiety economic and bodily at once, as if time were rations we waste by chewing on regret. Persius isn’t offering a gentle mindfulness slogan; he’s accusing his audience of self-cannibalism, devouring the only currency they actually possess - the future - to pay a debt that can’t be settled: the past.

That’s the satirist’s trick. He frames fretting as a kind of fraud: you think you’re doing responsible accounting (“If only I’d…”), but you’re really running up interest on nothing. The plural “tomorrows” and “yesterdays” widens the indictment beyond a single mistake into a habitual posture, a lifestyle of backward-facing rumination. It suggests a culture where status, reputation, and moral failure are endlessly audited, where people are trained to narrate their lives as a case file instead of an unfolding moment.

Context matters: Persius writes in the early empire, under Nero’s shadow, when public speech is risky and ethical seriousness often gets displaced into private discipline. Satire becomes the safer arena for truth-telling, and Stoic-inflected critique becomes a way to talk about freedom without naming politics. The line quietly implies that obsession with yesterday is a collaborator’s mentality: it keeps you busy, compliant, and trapped in rehearsals of what you can’t change. The real target isn’t “regret” as a feeling; it’s the cultivated habit of postponing life while pretending you’re being virtuous about it.