The excerpt connects finite existence with agency: action, pursuit and intention require continued life, which helps explain why future time matters to an active person.
The Round Table, No. 1, “On the Love of Life,” January 15, 1815. The phrase occurs inside Hazlitt’s broader argument that passions and projects strengthen attachment to life.
“When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.”
Work is imagined as a way of giving form to passing time, connecting effort with participation and expression.
The Prophet, “On Work.”
“First, do nothing inconsiderately, nor without a purpose.”
Deliberate action begins by knowing why an act is being done instead of moving from impulse, distraction, or social pressure.
Meditations, Book XII, section 20, George Long translation.
“Every action and moral choice, aims, it is thought, at some good.”
Actions and choices are intelligible because they pursue something taken to be good, even when people disagree about what the good actually is.
Nicomachean Ethics, Book I; the opening argument begins from the idea that action aims at a perceived good.
“Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.”
The passage favors an examined personal direction over drifting into a life selected by convention.
Walden; Thoreau contrasts one’s own deliberate track with paths chosen by others.
“Until thought is linked with purpose there is no intelligent accomplishment.”
Purpose gives thought a direction, turning ideas into a standard for choosing and completing useful work.
As a Man Thinketh, “Thought and Purpose.”
“He who has not one and always the same object in life cannot remain one and the same.”
A stable guiding aim can organize choices over time and prevent priorities from changing with every pressure.
Meditations, Book XI, in George Long’s translation; punctuation has been lightly modernized.
