L25 · Lens
Present moment and use of time
Life is long if used well; reclaim time from busyness and postponement and live in the present task.
Use: Busyness, postponing life, regret over wasted time.
Boundary: Presence in worthwhile action, not frantic busyness.
Cues
Showing 18 of 18 cues
“How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?”
“Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.”
“It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing.”
“Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time. We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession.”
“You regard it as a misfortune to die without seeing such sights. But when there is no need to travel at all, and where you are already, and Zeus is present in his works; will you not desire to contemplate these things and understand them? Will you never perceive either who you are, or for what you have been born, or the purpose for which this vision has been given to you?”
“I think when you multi-task so much, you don’t have time to think about anything deeply. You’re giving the world an advantage you shouldn’t do. Practically everybody is drifting into that mistake.”
“Concentrating hard on something that is important is ... I can’t succeed at all without doing it. I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span.”
“I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”
“I have to die. If it is now, well then I die now; if later, then now I will take my lunch, since the hour for lunch has arrived - and dying I will tend to later.”
“Let your every deed and thought be those of one who might depart from life this very moment.”
“Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment.”
“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but Nature’s sources never fail.”
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.”
“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”
“Not only that anything should be, but that this very thing should be, is mysterious!”
“Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.”
“When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep. Nay, when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts are some part of the time taken up with external occurrences, I some part of the time call them back again to my walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of that solitude, and to myself.”
“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”