What does this quote mean?

“The readiness is all.”

The emphasis is not on controlling every outcome but on meeting what comes with preparedness and acceptance.

Source note: Act 5, Scene 2.

“For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”

Life continues forward despite attachment to what has already happened, so care for the past cannot make the present remain there.

Source note: The Prophet, “On Children”; Gibran contrasts parents’ memory of yesterday with children belonging to a life that moves forward.

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”

The verse places change inside a larger rhythm of seasons and purposes, making it useful for thinking about acceptance when one phase of life gives way to another.

Source note: Ecclesiastes 3:1 in the King James Version, opening the sequence of contrasting times and seasons.

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”

Seneca shifts the complaint from life being too brief to attention and time being poorly spent.

Source note: English wording varies by translation.

“No one is so old as to think that he may not live a year.”

Even late in life people naturally continue to imagine a future, which helps explain why worthwhile work and planning do not simply stop with age.

Source note: Cato on Old Age, Shuckburgh translation, in a passage about older people planting for those who come after them.

“Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone for ever.”

Many losses can be repaired through later effort, but spent time cannot be recovered, giving attention and method unusual importance.

Source note: Self-Help, Chapter IX, “Men of Business,” Project Gutenberg #935. The sentence appears in Smiles’s discussion of method, punctuality and the economical use of time, contrasting losses that may be repaired with time once spent, which cannot be recovered.