This continuation page contains additional source-backed quotations not shown in the initial 50-quotation overview. Return to the topic guide and browse collection.
“’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”
The aging speaker refuses to treat reduced time or strength as a reason to stop seeking meaningful work.
Ulysses, in the closing address to the mariners.
“A desire for Friendship may arise quickly but not Friendship itself.”
Initial liking or a wish to become friends can happen immediately, but Aristotle reserves mature friendship for a relationship tested by time, familiarity and demonstrated character.
Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Chapter III, Project Gutenberg #8438. Aristotle has just argued that people must become mutually known and prove themselves fit objects of friendship before the relationship is complete.
“Time is a great deal more than money.”
Bennett treats time as the more fundamental resource because money can be gained or lost within time, whereas each passing hour is the fixed medium in which every other activity occurs.
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, opening discussion of the daily allotment of time. The represented public-domain Project Gutenberg text is #2274; the line is conduct-of-life rhetoric, not a literal economic equivalence.
“You can only waste the passing moment.”
The warning narrows time management to the moment actually available: past hours cannot be recovered and future hours cannot yet be spent.
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, “The Daily Miracle.” Bennett contrasts time with money and property while arguing that only the current flow of time can actually be wasted.
“You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.”
A failed plan need not govern the remainder of the day; Bennett frames each hour as another practical opportunity to restart deliberate action.
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, discussion of beginning a programme of self-directed use of spare time. The sentence is practical encouragement within Bennett’s period self-improvement argument.
“The only cure is to reconstitute the programme, and to attempt less.”
When a schedule becomes oppressive, Bennett recommends reducing the plan rather than allowing the plan itself to dominate the person it was meant to help.
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, “Dangers to Avoid.” Bennett is warning against becoming enslaved to an over-ambitious personal programme; “attempt less” is adjustment advice, not a general rejection of ambition.
“In a world where all is fleeting, change alone endures.”
Stability is temporary, so practical judgment requires expecting change rather than treating present arrangements as permanent.
Counsels and Maxims, T. Bailey Saunders translation, in a discussion of fortune and apparent stability.
“Lost time is never found again.”
Time is treated as uniquely unrecoverable, which gives ordinary delay a real opportunity cost.
Poor Richard’s Almanack.
“Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure.”
Leisure is easier to protect when working time is used deliberately, linking time management with freedom rather than treating organization as an end in itself.
Poor Richard’s Almanack; the maxim connects disciplined use of working time with the ability to gain leisure.
“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.”
Time is treated as the substance from which life is built, so wasting it means spending something that cannot be recovered.
Poor Richard’s Almanack; the maxim connects the value of life directly with the use of time.
“Never leave that till tomorrow, which you can do to-day.”
The maxim turns prompt action into a habit: work that can reasonably be completed now should not be needlessly transferred to an uncertain tomorrow.
The Way to Wealth; a Poor Richard maxim on delay and useful employment of time.
“The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.”
Pascal humorously links brevity with revision time: concise expression can require more deliberate work than writing at length under pressure.
The Provincial Letters, Letter XVI, dated December 4, 1656, Project Gutenberg #73959. Pascal apologizes for the unusual length and rapid succession of his letters, saying the present one is long because he had no leisure to make it shorter. The sentence belongs to translated seventeenth-century religious polemic and is a witty observation about composition, not a measured productivity law.
“Procrastination is the thief of time. Collar him!”
Delay is personified as a thief because it quietly removes time that cannot later be recovered.
David Copperfield; Mr. Micawber’s advice.
“I'd use to-day that cannot last, Be glad to-day and sing.”
Awareness that another spring is not guaranteed turns attention toward using the present day rather than postponing every form of gladness.
“Another Spring,” Project Gutenberg #16950. The stanza begins conditionally—'If I might see another Spring'—so the present-focused conclusion grows from mortality and uncertainty.
“There is no life like Spring-life born to die.”
Rossetti places renewal beside mortality in the same phrase, making seasonal beauty meaningful partly because its new life is temporary.
“Spring,” Project Gutenberg #16950. This is a lyric reflection on transience, not a literal biological generalization about all life.
“Will the day's journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend.”
The answer accepts that a meaningful journey may require the whole available day rather than promising a quick or effortless finish.
“Up-Hill,” Project Gutenberg #16950. The poem is an allegorical question-and-answer sequence about the soul’s journey, endurance and eventual rest.
“The course of life is fixed, and nature admits of its being run but in one way, and only once.”
Each stage of life occurs only once, so wisdom includes accepting its appropriate strengths instead of endlessly trying to restore an earlier stage.
Cato on Old Age, Shuckburgh translation, in Cicero’s discussion of the distinctive advantages of each season of life.
“Adventures do occur, but not punctually.”
The narrator notes that meaningful or unexpected experiences cannot be scheduled simply because a person has decided that a particular moment ought to become interesting.
A Passage to India, Project Gutenberg #61221. The narrator explains Mrs. Moore’s more patient response to disappointment after an outing fails to materialize on cue; the sentence belongs to fictional narration.
“What then is to be done? Be wise with speed; A fool at forty is a fool indeed.”
Young’s satirical couplet urges people not to postpone the cultivation of judgment until age has made long-standing folly harder to excuse.
Love of Fame, the Universal Passion, Satire II, from the seven-satire sequence issued in the 1720s and represented in Project Gutenberg #18827. The couplet belongs to Young’s satirical moral persona; its age-based sting is period rhetoric rather than an empirical claim about people at forty.
“Procrastination is the thief of time;”
Young personifies procrastination as something that steadily steals finite time while people postpone decisions and assume future opportunities will remain available.
Night Thoughts, Night I. The line appears in Young’s long religious and philosophical poem about mortality, delay and preparation for death; it is poetic moral reflection rather than productivity research.
“Autumn spoke loudly of the beautiful.”
Wilcox treats autumn itself as an emphatic expression of beauty, using seasonal color and change as evidence for attentive aesthetic appreciation.
Poems of Optimism, “Beauty”; Project Gutenberg #7421. The surrounding stanza describes autumn forests as a gallery of vivid colors; the line is poetic and devotional observation, not a scientific claim about aesthetic value.
“Cold in the earth—and fifteen wild Decembers, From those brown hills, have melted into spring.”
The poem measures bereavement through fifteen winters turning into spring, making seasonal change a visible clock for grief that has lasted across years.
“Remembrance,” in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846); Project Gutenberg #1019. The line belongs to a dramatic lyric voice and is not biographical evidence by itself.
“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”
Mortality cannot be eliminated, so the practical answer is to make conscious use of the finite span between beginning and end.
Soliloquies in England, “War Shrines”; the sentence follows a contrast between strained worldliness and a more festive acceptance of life.
“Márgarét, áre you gríeving Over Goldengrove unleaving?”
Hopkins begins with a child grieving autumn leaves and gradually widens that feeling into a meditation on human awareness of loss, change and mortality.
“Spring and Fall: to a young child,” written in 1880 and published posthumously in 1918, represented by Poetry Foundation. Margaret is the poem’s addressed child; the meditation is literary and theological rather than a clinical account of grief development.
“The sun is but a morning star.”
The final image turns sunrise into a metaphor for further beginnings, suggesting that even apparent completion can still open toward another dawn.
Walden, Conclusion; Thoreau closes the book by insisting that more day remains to dawn before describing the sun as only a morning star.
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
The line criticizes unnecessary complexity and argues for protecting attention from endless small demands.
Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.”
“To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”
Daily life becomes something that can be shaped deliberately through attention, choices, and routine.
Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.”
“Act—act in the living Present!”
The imperative shifts attention from regret and speculation toward action available in the present.
A Psalm of Life; the line follows the instruction to let the dead past bury its dead.
“One by one they were all becoming shades.”
Gabriel’s thoughts widen from one dead young man to the mortality of everyone around him, preparing the story’s final meditation on memory and the living and dead.
“The Dead,” in Dubliners, Project Gutenberg #2814. The line belongs to Gabriel Conroy’s interior reflection after Gretta tells him about Michael Furey; it is fictional free-indirect narration.
“That wastes time just as well and does not look so bad.”
The narrator recommends smoking over continued idle talk because both waste time but only one looks more respectable, turning appearance into the joke’s practical standard.
The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, “On Being Idle”; the line follows the suggestion to stop talking and have a smoke.
“Every man desires to live long; but no man would be old.”
Swift compresses a familiar contradiction into satire: people may desire a long life while resisting the aging that necessarily accompanies it.
Thoughts on Various Subjects, c. 1713, Wikisource transcription. The aphorism is a satirical paradox about longevity and aging, not advice to fear or devalue old age.
“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.
The Prophet, “On Children”; Gibran contrasts parents’ memory of yesterday with children belonging to a life that moves forward.
“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.”
“A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.”
Different seasons of life call for different emotional responses; mourning is not a permanent failure but one legitimate part of human time.
Ecclesiastes 3:4 in the King James Version.
“So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”
Awareness of limited time is turned into a reason to choose more wisely rather than merely fear mortality.
Psalm 90:12 in the King James Version.
“I know but too well how time flies along, That we live but few years, and yet fewer are young.”
The speaker recognizes that both life and youth are brief, then uses that awareness to explain why a relationship should be worth the time and consequences it demands.
The Lover: A Ballad, represented by the University of Toronto Representative Poetry Online text from Robert Dodsley’s 1748 A Collection of Poems by Several Hands. The line belongs to a lyric speaker weighing desire against the risk of later regret; it is not treated as a verbatim autobiographical confession by Montagu.
“The strongest of all warriors are these two—Time and Patience.”
Some conflicts are changed less by force than by endurance and the gradual effects of time.
War and Peace; public-domain translations vary slightly.
“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
The White Queen treats remembering the future as perfectly ordinary, producing humor by applying confident logic to an impossible premise.
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter V, “Wool and Water,” printed page 95 / scan leaf 115 in the fully validated 1872 Macmillan first-edition witness on Wikisource. The White Queen calls a memory that only works backwards “a poor sort of memory” while explaining the Looking-Glass world’s comic backwards logic. The line remains fictional character dialogue, not a claim about human memory science.
“The universe is transformation: life is opinion.”
Change is treated as the condition of the world, while our experience of life is shaped by judgment.
Meditations, Book IV, in George Long’s translation.
“Do every act of thy life as if it were the last.”
Treating action as potentially final concentrates attention on doing the present duty carefully instead of postponing integrity or focus.
Meditations, Book II, section 5, George Long translation; this clause occurs inside a longer instruction about dignity and reason.
“While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.”
Limited time turns character into a present-tense responsibility rather than a future intention.
Meditations, Book IV, in George Long’s translation.
“Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years.”
Mortality is used to challenge postponement: limited time makes present conduct more important than fantasies of an indefinitely extended future.
Meditations, Book IV, section 17, in George Long’s translation.
“Suffering is one very long moment.”
Severe suffering can collapse ordinary time into one continuous experience, making individual days feel less distinct than the pain that joins them.
De Profundis, public-domain 1913 Methuen text; the sentence appears in Wilde’s description of prison time and the apparent sameness of suffering.
“Time, not the will, can put an end to love.”
The maxim distinguishes deliberate decision from emotional change, suggesting that some attachments fade through time rather than a single act of will.
The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, saying 43, D. Lyman Jr. translation (1856).
“The years teach much which the days never know.”
Some lessons only become visible across long stretches of experience and cannot be forced into a single day of reflection.
Essay “Experience,” Essays: Second Series.
“The gap of time since I had seen him last had made no impression on me”
Jefferies describes memory resisting elapsed time: the remembered person remains vivid even though years have passed and death has created an irreversible break in the present.
Field and Hedgerow; Project Gutenberg #7030. The sentence occurs in a recollection of John Brown after his death and is kept in that personal-memory context rather than generalized into abstract grief advice.
“as the spring began, came crowds of chiffchaffs and willow-wrens”
The arrival of birds marks spring through recurring natural events, showing how Jefferies reads time through seasonal change and attention rather than through dates alone.
Nature Near London, Preface, Project Gutenberg #18629. The represented witness reads 'First, as the spring began, came crowds of chiffchaffs and willow-wrens'; the frozen catalog excerpt begins with 'as the spring began' and therefore drops the introductory 'First,'. Jefferies is recording one local observational experience near London, explicitly warning later in the Preface that season, locality and weather vary; it is not a universal present-day phenology schedule.
“Now is eternity; now is the immortal life.”
The repeated ‘now’ intensifies Jefferies’s claim that spiritual significance is experienced in the present rather than postponed to a distant future or afterlife.
The Story of My Heart (1883), Chapter III, Project Gutenberg #2317. The inherited Chapter I note is corrected: ‘Now is eternity; now is the immortal life’ immediately follows the same tumulus passage in which Jefferies treats the present moment as continuous eternity. This is his personal metaphysical/spiritual intuition, not empirical evidence for immortality, neuroscience or clinical guidance.
“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be,”
Browning’s dramatic speaker frames aging not merely as decline but as part of a larger spiritual development in which later life can complete what youth only begins.
“Rabbi Ben Ezra” (1864), represented in Project Gutenberg #59123, The Works of Robert Browning. The poem speaks through Browning’s imagined Rabbi Ben Ezra and is explicitly theistic; its confidence about age and providence is poetic-religious argument rather than a factual guarantee about later life.
“Fair Daffodils, we weep to see You haste away so soon;”
Herrick uses the brief flowering of daffodils as a mirror for human transience, connecting natural beauty with the sadness of limited time.
“To Daffodils,” from Hesperides (1648), represented by Project Gutenberg #1211. The poem develops a conventional lyric comparison between short-lived flowers and human mortality.
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying:”
Herrick’s speaker uses rapidly fading flowers as a carpe-diem image, urging action while youth and opportunity remain available.
“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” published in Hesperides in 1648. The poem’s later marriage exhortation reflects its seventeenth-century social setting; the opening image is retained as literary carpe-diem rhetoric, not universal relationship advice.
“If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.”
Time is treated as something to inhabit fully through sustained effort rather than something to merely count.
If—, final stanza; the line joins limited time with sustained effort.
“we have suffered our purposes to sleep till the time of action is past”
Johnson describes procrastination as allowing intended work to remain dormant until the opportunity to act has disappeared.
The Idler, No. 88; this clause comes from Johnson’s reflection on private ambitions that remain unfinished while days and years pass.
“This was, in truth the secret of his success”
Smiles uses Bianconi’s minute-conscious working habits to illustrate how disciplined use of time contributed to practical business success.
Men of Invention and Industry, Chapter IX, “Charles Bianconi: A Lesson of Self-Help in Ireland”; Project Gutenberg #725. This excerpt is Smiles’s narrative conclusion immediately after an anecdote about saving time.
“the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.”
The narrator distinguishes immediate attraction from friendship that deepens slowly through sustained familiarity, experience and shared life.
The Country of the Pointed Firs, opening chapter, represented by Project Gutenberg #367. This is first-person literary narration about the narrator’s return to Dunnet Landing; the lower-case opening is preserved because the quotation is a clause excerpted from a longer sentence.
“Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.”
Seneca argues against postponing life into an imagined future and asks the reader to treat the present day as complete enough for deliberate living.
Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 101.
“No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it.”
An obsession with extending life can undermine the peace of the life already present, because fear of ending displaces attention from living.
Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 4.
“Silent it will glide on.”
Time often disappears without a dramatic signal, which makes ordinary attention more important than waiting for a crisis to announce that life is passing.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter VIII; Seneca describes life continuing quietly regardless of power or applause.
“No one is his own master.”
Seneca uses mastery here as ownership of one’s time and direction rather than power over other people.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter II; follows the example of people living through chains of obligation.
“Present time is very brief.”
The present cannot be stored; its brevity is exactly why deliberate attention matters.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter X; opening clause of Seneca’s description of the present as continuously moving.
“No one asserts his claim to himself.”
A person can defend property yet fail to protect attention, allowing other demands to occupy the life that only they can decide how to use.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter II; part of Seneca’s criticism of people who give all their time away.
“How little of yourself was left to you.”
The question reframes time management as self-possession: what matters is not only busyness but how much of one’s life remained available for chosen purposes.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter III; part of Seneca’s inventory of where a lifetime disappears.
“They spend life in making ready to live!”
Preparation becomes self-defeating when it permanently replaces the life it was supposed to make possible.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter IX; Seneca describes people who stay busy preparing for a future life.
“Life, if you know how to use it, is long.”
The problem is not simply the number of years available but whether those years are directed toward purposes a person actually values.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter II; opening claim before Seneca lists ways people become engrossed.
“The part of life we really live is small.”
Seneca distinguishes existing from deliberately living, warning that a large calendar can still contain very little time that feels genuinely one’s own.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter II; Seneca cites the line while arguing that much existence is merely time.
“Postponement is the greatest waste of life.”
Delay is costly because it exchanges a real day for a future that remains uncertain and therefore cannot be spent yet.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter IX; sentence in Seneca’s criticism of distant plans that steal the present.
“Even though you seize it, it still will flee.”
Attention cannot make time stop; its value lies in actually inhabiting a passing day rather than assuming it can be preserved for later.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter IX; Seneca immediately qualifies his call to seize the day by emphasizing that time remains swift even when used well.
“Our life is amply long for him who orders it properly.”
A finite life can still be sufficient when attention is deliberately ordered instead of being scattered across pursuits that do not deserve it.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter I; John W. Basore translation, concluding Seneca’s opening comparison between life and wealth under a good guardian.
“Old age surprises them while their minds are still childish.”
Years can accumulate without corresponding preparation or maturity when a person repeatedly postpones the work of deciding how they want to live.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter IX; Seneca describes the engrossed reaching old age unprepared because they failed to notice its daily approach.
“The present offers only one day at a time, and each by minutes.”
Life is experienced in small units rather than as the abstract total of one’s expected lifespan, making attention to ordinary minutes consequential.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter X; Seneca contrasts the small present with the recoverable memory of past days.
“What guarantee, pray, have you that your life will last longer?”
Future plans are not rejected, but Seneca refuses to treat longevity as a certainty that can justify endless postponement.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter III; Seneca challenges plans to begin living only after retirement from public duties.
“How late it is to begin to live just when we must cease to live!”
The line challenges plans that postpone meaningful living until an imagined later stage when there may be little time left to use.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter III; Seneca criticizes reserving wisdom and leisure for very old age.
“You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply.”
Time is treated as a finite resource that becomes easy to waste when its remaining amount is assumed rather than known.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter III; part of Seneca’s warning against acting as though every day were guaranteed.
“All things that are still to come lie in uncertainty; live straightway!”
Uncertainty about the future becomes an argument for using the available present rather than waiting for perfect guarantees.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter IX; follows Seneca’s contrast between what is in Fortune’s hands and what is presently one’s own.
“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.
English wording varies by translation.
“Yet no one will bring back the years, no one will bestow you once more on yourself.”
Lost time cannot be restored in the way money or possessions sometimes can, so protecting one’s years becomes a form of protecting oneself.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter VIII; Seneca warns that even people who know time is precious often give it away without noticing the loss.
“In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns.”
The objective should govern the campaign; activity that continues without advancing the actual goal wastes resources and creates new vulnerabilities.
The Art of War, Chapter II “Waging War,” section 19, Lionel Giles translation (1910), printed page 16 / scan leaf 72 in Giles’s original full edition on Wikisource, cross-checked against Project Gutenberg #17405. “In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns” is the chapter’s concluding strategic principle immediately before the statement about the commander and the people’s fate. It remains ancient battlefield/statecraft argument, not current military operational advice or a context-free productivity maxim.
“There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.”
Long conflict consumes strength and resources, so duration itself becomes a strategic cost even before the outcome is decided.
The Art of War, Chapter II “Waging War,” section 6, Lionel Giles translation (1910), printed page 12 / scan leaf 68 in Giles’s original full edition on Wikisource, cross-checked against Project Gutenberg #17405. “There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare” closes the opening argument about weapons, strength, treasure and state resources being exhausted by a protracted campaign. It remains ancient military-strategy argument in translation, not a generic business, relationship or current geopolitical rule.
“Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us.”
Browne uses the image of flame to contrast fragile embodied life with the inward spiritual principle through which he interprets mortality and immortality.
Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, Chapter V, Project Gutenberg #586. The represented 1869 J. W. Willis Bund collection states that its Hydriotaphia text is taken from the 1686 folio edition. “Life is a pure flame” occurs inside Browne’s Christian meditation on burial, resurrection, mortality and posthumous memory; the “invisible sun” is metaphysical-religious imagery, not scientific evidence.
“the sum of knowledge for all of us.”
Carlyle says understanding the present includes asking what the present situation requires people to do, joining interpretation of one’s time with practical judgment.
Latter-Day Pamphlets, No. I “The Present Time”; Project Gutenberg #1140. The excerpt completes Carlyle’s sentence about knowing the present time and what it bids people do; the local political context remains essential.
“work while it is called Today.”
The sentence places useful effort in the time actually available now, making present action more important than indefinite postponement.
Past and Present, Book III, Chapter XII, “Reward,” printed page 251 in Thomas Carlyle’s Collected Works, Library Edition, Vol. XIII (London: Chapman and Hall), Project Gutenberg #26159. Carlyle says one shall “work while it is called Today” immediately before “For the Night cometh, wherein no man can work,” retaining the biblical allusion and nineteenth-century religious exhortation rather than reframing it as productivity science.
“The moments were numbered; the strife was finished; the vision was closed.”
The compressed sentence captures the instant in which a terrifying encounter becomes irreversible memory, emphasizing how abruptly danger can pass into recollection.
The English Mail-Coach, represented by Project Gutenberg #6359 in the volume The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc. The sentence follows the near-collision / dream-fugue sequence and is highly literary first-person prose, not an objective report of measured time.
“The Paths of Glory lead but to the Grave.”
Gray compresses the elegy’s meditation on mortality into the reminder that wealth, beauty, status and public achievement do not remove the common human endpoint of death.
An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751 first edition), represented by Project Gutenberg #15409. The capitalization follows the represented edition; the line is poetic reflection on mortality and social distinction.
“You did not come, And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.”
Absence becomes more painful as time continues, with the missed meeting represented not as a single moment but as a prolonged experience of disappointed expectation.
“A Broken Appointment,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. The poem's speaker addresses an absent person; the line is retained as dramatic lyric context.
“Thus meet we five, in this still place, At this point of time, at this point in space.”
The speaker's quiet encounter with small nocturnal creatures is fixed to one precise moment and place, making attention itself the poem's central event.
“An August Midnight,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. The five include the speaker and small creatures gathered around his writing table.
“Wintertime nighs; But my bereavement-pain It cannot bring again: Twice no one dies.”
Returning winter cannot recreate the first shock of bereavement, suggesting that repeated seasons may revisit memory without reproducing an earlier loss in exactly the same form.
“De Profundis I,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. The poem reflects on recurring seasons and a past bereavement; it does not prescribe a universal grief timetable.
“Flower-petals flee; But, since it once hath been, No more that severing scene Can harrow me.”
Falling petals accompany a recognition that a severing event belongs to the past and cannot happen for the first time again, joining natural recurrence to changed grief.
“De Profundis I,” Project Gutenberg #3168. The passage belongs to one speaker's reflection on bereavement and seasonal return.
“Waking but now, when leaves like corpses fall, And saps all retrocede.”
The late-blooming flower appears precisely as the rest of the season retreats, combining natural decline with an image of delayed emergence rather than simple renewal.
“The Last Chrysanthemum,” Project Gutenberg #3168. The corpse comparison is figurative seasonal language inside the poem.
“Now is the time of plaintive robin-song, When flowers are in their tombs.”
Seasonal decline is compressed into robin-song and buried flowers, giving late autumn an explicitly elegiac atmosphere before the poem turns to the surviving chrysanthemum.
“The Last Chrysanthemum,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. Floral death is poetic seasonal imagery, not literal human bereavement.
“Blessings emblazoned that day Everything glowed with a gleam; Yet we were looking away!”
Looking backward reveals value that was not fully noticed while the moment was being lived, giving the remembered family scene both warmth and regret.
“The Self-Unseeing,” Project Gutenberg #3168. The exclamation closes a poem of retrospective domestic memory and should not be detached from that remembered household scene.
“Time makes more converts than reason.”
Ideas that initially provoke resistance can become easier to accept as experience changes what people consider normal or possible.
Common Sense (1776), Introduction. The represented wording is verified in Project Gutenberg #147 and the validated scan-backed Wikisource 1776 sixth-edition transcription; Paine follows his warning that custom can make an error look right by observing that time often changes opinion where argument initially does not.
“The future is no more uncertain than the present.”
Whitman refuses to treat the future as uniquely unknowable: within the poem's larger meditation on what endures, present conditions are themselves unstable and changing, so uncertainty belongs to both horizons.
Leaves of Grass (1882), “Song of the Broad-Axe,” section 4; Wikisource 1882 transcription. The line appears after “And the dead advance as much as the living advance” and before Whitman turns from institutions and structures toward the personal qualities he says endure.
“I never forgot her; but the pang of remembrance lost its worst bitterness, little by little.”
Franklin Blake says distance and new experience reduced the sharpest pain of remembering Rachel without erasing the attachment itself.
The Moonstone, Project Gutenberg #155. Franklin Blake narrates his attempt to recover after leaving England; the sentence continues by explaining the effects of time, distance and novelty. This is fictional reflection, not clinical guidance.
“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
Jim recognizes that a shared history can remain a lasting bond even when people cannot recover everything that time and separation have taken away.
My Ántonia, Book V, Chapter III, Project Gutenberg #242. Jim Burden returns to the old road that first carried him and Ántonia into Nebraska and concludes that whatever they missed, they still possess “the precious, the incommunicable past.” The sentence is retrospective fictional narration about shared memory, belonging and time, not a psychological law.
“Hurry never realizes that slow, careful foundation work is the quickest in the end.”
Speed without preparation can create rework; Jordan argues that careful foundational effort can be more efficient over the full course of a task.
The Majesty of Calmness, essay II, “Hurry, the Scourge of America,” Project Gutenberg #6911. Jordan contrasts purposeful haste with confused hurry and says that slow, careful foundation work can be quickest in the end. It is period moral rhetoric about overwork, pace and preparation rather than a universal productivity finding.
“We make the coming age our own.”
Youth is portrayed as imaginatively possessing the future before experience has imposed clear limits, turning coming time into a field of possibility rather than scarcity.
On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth, first published March 1827. The sentence belongs to Hazlitt’s account of expansive youthful expectation and should not be treated as a literal claim of control over the future.
“No young man believes he shall ever die.”
Hazlitt describes the psychological distance of mortality in youth: death can be known abstractly while still feeling too remote to shape one’s immediate sense of life.
‘On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth,’ opening of the essay first published unsigned in The Monthly Magazine, March 1827, represented in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, Volume XII, Project Gutenberg #72206. ‘No young man believes he shall ever die’ opens Hazlitt's rhetorical account of youth's felt distance from mortality; it is historical essay reflection, not a literal claim about every young person.
“The love of life is, in general, the effect not of our enjoyments, but of our passions.”
Hazlitt argues that attachment to continued life is driven less by a simple calculation of pleasure than by active desires, interests and passions that keep a person engaged with what may happen next.
The Round Table, No. 1, ‘On the Love of Life,’ dated 15 January 1815 in the represented collected text, Project Gutenberg #55932. The sentence opens Hazlitt's argument that attachment to life is driven more by active passions than by present enjoyment and is immediately followed by ‘Without life there can be no action.’ It is philosophical-psychological essay argument, not modern clinical evidence.
“I have some desire to enjoy the present good, and some fondness for the past”
Hazlitt states his own temporal bias plainly: he values present experience and retains an attachment to what has already been lived rather than treating only the future as significant.
Table-Talk, Volume I, Essay III, “On the Past and Future,” Project Gutenberg #3020. “I have some desire to enjoy the present good, and some fondness for the past” appears in the opening paragraph, where Hazlitt states his own lack of sanguine expectation before developing the essay’s argument. This is first-person literary-philosophical reflection, not an empirical claim about how people should value past, present or future.
“Concentration is an art of slow acquisition”
Concentration is treated as a capacity built gradually through repeated practice, making sustained attention a training process rather than an instant demand for maximum efficiency.
A Way of Life, section IV, printed page 14, London: Constable & Company Ltd. (1913), Project Gutenberg #73116. “Concentration is an art of slow acquisition” follows Osler’s advice about steady daily dedication and hour-tight focus. It remains historical educational/professional counsel rather than a quantified modern efficiency rule.
