Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: IVP
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
You only live once—if then. Life is short, and it can be as easily wasted as lived to the full. In our harried modern world, how do we make the most of the time we have? In these fast and superficial times, Os Guinness calls us to consequential living. As a contrast to both Eastern and secularist views of time, he restructures our very notion of history as linear and purposeful, not as cyclical or meaningless. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, time and history are meaningful, and human beings have agency to live with freedom and consequence in partnership with God. Thus we can seek to serve God's intentions for our generation and discern our call for this moment. Our time on earth has significance. Live rightly, discern the times, and redeem the day.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 252
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
DOM
and to CJ,
With love, admiration,
a fierce pride,
and a strong hope
Teach us to number our days,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven—
A time to give birth and a time to die;
A time to plant and a time to uproot what is planted.
A time to kill and a time to heal;
A time to tear down and a time to build up.
A time to weep and a time to laugh.
A time to mourn and a time to dance.
A time to throw stones and a time to gather stones.
A time to embrace and a time to shun embracing.
A time to search and a time to give up as lost;
A time to keep and a time to throw away.
A time to tear apart and a time to sew together;
A time to be silent and a time to speak.
A time to love and a time to hate;
A time for war and a time for peace.
Time is a created thing. To say “I don’t have time,”
is like saying, “I don’t want to.”
Time was past—thou canst it not recall. Time is thou hast—
employ thy portion small. Time future is not, and may never be. Time present is the only time for thee.
Do not put your work off till tomorrow or the day after, for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn.
Time will reveal everything. It is a babbler,
and speaks even when not asked.
Live for today; plan for tomorrow; remember yesterday.
Beware the barrenness of a busy life.
Heraclitus, I believe, says that all things pass and nothing stays,
and comparing existing things to the flow of a river,
he says you could not step twice into the same river.
Socrates: “There’s nothing I like better, Cephalus, than talking with
old men. I see them as travellers who have gone ahead on a road we too may have to go, and we ought to find out what it’s like—rough and difficult or smooth and easy.”
As you, so I, so everyone.
Can anything be more ridiculous than a traveller needing more provisions the closer he is to his destination?
I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years to come; take your ease, eat, drink and be merry.”
But God said to him, “You fool! This very night your soul is required of you; and now who will own what you have prepared?”
I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Be wise, strain the wine and cut back long hope into a small space. Even as we speak, envious time flies past. Seize the day [carpe diem] and leave as little as possible for tomorrow.
There is nothing the busy man is less busy with than living. . . .
[The wise man] plans out every day as if it were his last. . . .
It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. . . . The life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill-provided but use what we have wastefully.
How trivial life is: yesterday a drop of semen, today a mummy or ashes.
Spend therefore these fleeting moments as Nature would have you
spend them, and then go to your rest with a good grace, as an olive
falls in season, with a blessing for the earth that bore it and a
thanksgiving to the tree that gave it life. . . . Perfection of character
is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretense.
How can the past and the future be, when the past
no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present,
if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.
The wisest are the most annoyed at the loss of time.
Then to the lip of this poor earthen Urn
I leaned, the Secret of my Life to learn:
And Lip to Lip it murmured—“While you live
Drink!—for, once dead, you never shall return.”
There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the
flood leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us?
Time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all its sons away;
they fly forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.
Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old. . . . May you live all the days of your life.
Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.
You may delay, but time will not.
Edmund Burke was always right, but he was right too soon.
Time will explain.
Write it on your heart that every day is the
best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday.
Nothing must be postponed. Take time by the forelock. Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this. Where the good husbandman is, there is the good soil. Take any other course, and life will be a succession of regrets. Let us see vessels sailing prosperously before the wind, and not simply stranded barks. There is no world for the penitent and regretful.
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.
Life can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards.
My question, the one that brought me to the point of suicide when I was fifty years old, was a simple one that lies in the soul of every person, from a silly child to a wise old man. It is the question without which life is impossible, as I had learnt from experience. It is this: what will become of what I do today or tomorrow? What will come of my entire life?
Expressed another way the question can be put like this: why do I live? Why do I wish for anything, or do anything? Or expressed another way: is there any meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the inevitability of death which awaits me?
What if my whole life has really been wrong?
I can write only from memory. I never write directly from life. The subject must pass through the sieve of my memory, so that only what is important . . . remains.
Alice: “How long is forever?”
White Rabbit: “Sometimes just one second.”
To know the future is no more desirable in the life of mankind
than in the life of the individual. And our astrological impatience
for such knowledge is sheer folly. . . . A future known in advance is an absurdity.
In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will
be in the world only once and that there will be no second chance . . . he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience—why?
This life, as you live it at present, and have lived it, you must live it
once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing
new in it, but every pain and every joy and thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakable small and great in thy life must come to you again, and all in the same series and sequence.
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
Time is
Too Slow for those who Wait,
Too Swift for those who Fear,
Too Long for those who Grieve,
Too Short for those who Rejoice,
But for those who Love,
Time is not.
Today will die tomorrow. Time stoops to no man’s lure.
I am always late on principle, my principle being
that punctuality is the thief of time.
You have only a few years to live really, perfectly, fully. . . . Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. . . . Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. . . . A new Hedonism—that is what our century wants.
Enjoy life. There’s plenty of time to be dead.
It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you
and gives you a deeper meaning.
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream
by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day
to find it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are
dangerous men, for they may act their dreams
with open eyes, to make it possible.
Clocks slay time . . . time is dead as long as it is being
clicked off by little wheels; only when the
clock stops does time come to life.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
Time is evil, a mortal disease, exuding a fatal nostalgia.
The passage of time strikes a man’s heart with despair,
and fills his gaze with sadness.
What a wonderful life I’ve had!
I only wish I’d realized it earlier.
The error of the old doctrine of progress
lay in affirming a priori that man
progresses toward the better.
I was, and am, acutely aware that life is ephemeral, limited and brief. I never wake up in the morning without being surprised at being alive: I never go to sleep without wondering whether I shall wake up. Death to me was the reality. Yet everybody I met and saw seemed unaware of it. They seemed to live as if they would live forever. How else could they spend forty years marking exercise-books, going to an office to earn the money which would enable them to go on going to an office which would enable them to go on going to an office—I could see a skull beneath every bowler hat. . . . I was obsessed with the feeling that I was a small boat floating on an ocean, and the ocean was death.
Here was a new generation, grown up to find all Gods dead,
all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.
Because things are the way they are,
things will not stay the way they are.
Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.
There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that, everything is possible. I cannot force you to believe in God. Believing in God amounts to coming to terms with death. When you have accepted death, the problem of God will be solved—and not the reverse.
Time is “an unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality. . . . To realize the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.”
Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over; it is given to us at dawn, and taken away from us at dusk.
As often as possible, when a really beautiful bottle of wine is before me, I drink all I can of it, even when I know I have had more than I want physically. That is gluttonous. But I think to myself, when again will I have this taste upon my tongue? Where else in the world is there just such wine as this, with just this bouquet, at just this heat, in just this crystal cup? And when again will I be alive to it as I am this very minute, sitting here on a green hillside above the sea, or in this dim, murmuring, richly odorous restaurant, or here in this fisherman’s café on the wharf?
To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past, perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.
The word death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips.
I believe that the reformation of our civilization must begin with a reflection on time.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
The future is something that everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.
There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.
A special consciousness is required to recognize the ultimate significance of time. We all live in it and are so close to being identical with it that we fail to notice it. The world of space surrounds our existence. It is but a part of living, the rest is time. Things are the shore, the voyage is in time.
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
The self which seeks the realization of itself within itself destroys itself.
The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real—the here and now. Seize the day. . . . Grasp the hour, the moment, the instant.
How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness, how the time has flewn. How did it get to be so late so soon?
The function of science fiction is not to
describe the future, but to prevent it.
It’s paradoxical that the idea of living a long life
appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting
old doesn’t appeal to anyone.
One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.
Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
We are all historians by nature, while we are only scientists by choice.
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge more than society gathers wisdom.
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to partake in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out his moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
I think you can reach a state of consciousness, a state where you are not aware of anything . . . you’re just being. The happiest people are those who are being more times a week than anybody else.
Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.
Yesterday has gone. Tomorrow has not yet come.
We have only today. Let us begin.
The older we get, the better we used to be.
We’re brought up to the clock, we’re brought up to respect the
clock, admire the clock. We live our life to the clock. You clock in
to the clock. You clock out to the clock. You come home to the clock.
You eat to the clock, you drink to the clock, you go to bed to
the clock . . . you do that for forty years of your life, you retire, and what do they give you? An f-ing clock!
You can live to be 100 if you give up all the things
that make you want to live to be 100.
What can life be worth if the first rehearsal
for life is life itself ? . . . If we only have one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
The future starts today, not tomorrow.
Most of Virgin’s successes can be
attributed to carpe diem moments
spurred by optimism.
It’s always about timing. If it’s too soon, no one understands. If it’s too late, everyone’s forgotten.
What is more contemptible than a civilization
that scorns knowledge of itself?
Today, endless books bang on about “the promotion of successful ageing,” largely because the world of technology-and-youth-maddened twenty first century resists the very idea of ageing. Cicero’s message was: resist if you must, but much good it will do you. Raging against the dying of the light sounds all very romantic, but it is about as useful as raging against gravity.
I HAVE OFTEN TOLD THE STORY of the time I was returning from Brussels to London on the Eurostar. As the train approached St. Pancras Station in central London, it went past some dilapidated Victorian buildings beside the track. Many of them were covered with a splattered mess of graffiti, slogans, and protest symbols. But one wall carried a message that was clearly readable as the train slowed before entering the station.
You only live once, and it doesn’t last.
So live it up. Drink it down.
Laugh it off. Burn it at both ends.
You can’t take it with you. You only live once.
Those words are of course a summary of the short-lived YOLO philosophy (“You Only Live Once”). The idea swept many university and college campuses briefly as a much-popularized version of what was taken to be Epicurus’s famous maxim, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” But regardless of the distortion of Epicurus, it’s probable that few devotees of YOLO were aware of one original formulation that set out the philosophy with a sharp sting in its tail: “You only live once—if then.”
That blunt version of the YOLO philosophy, and indeed the entire craze for purpose today—books, seminars, conferences, life coaches, slogans, and all—raises important questions: What does it say of how we see the meaning of life, and how we are to make the most of it? From our dawning consciousness of the world as infants to our waking every morning to a new day of life and a world outside us that we can see, hear, and touch, we are always and only at the very center of our lives and therefore at the center of existence as we know it. It is therefore a jolt, a fundamental jolt, to realize how that perspective carries an illusion.
We are simply not at the center of existence. We will not always be here, and the universe will go on without us as if we had never been here. Most people never hear of us even while we are here, and all too soon it will be as if we had never been here at all. For almost all but the tiniest handful of us, the day will come when there is no trace of us in the living memory of the earth.
Thus for all our sense of significance, whether modest or inflated, we are all, as the Greeks said, “mortals.” In the words of a Roman epitaph, “As I, so you, so everyone.” Or as the Bible states simply, “You are dust, and to dust you will return” (Gen 3:19). Human life is hemmed in by three words and the reality they speak of: mortality, brevity, fragility—the last because all that shows we are alive and separates us from death is a mere breath, and one day a single breath will be our last. Who, if they have ever seen a great performance of Shakespeare’s King Lear, can ever forget the anguish of the old king holding his dead daughter Cordelia in his arms, as if he could put a mirror to her lips and see if there was even the slightest vapor on the glass? “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all?”1
One single breath? And a finite number of breaths that in a finite number of days could all be counted? Does the shortness of it all leave you dizzy? Does the truth that we are “born to live to die” give life the sense of Milan Kundera’s “unbearable lightness of being”? Are we to conclude with the writer of Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (Eccles 1:2)? Life is so short, and it can as easily be wasted as lived to the full, so what does it all add up to? How do we make the most of such fleeting days on earth? What does such a microsecond life say of our understanding of life, meaning, purpose, identity, truth, and of notions such as right and wrong? What does it say of how we understand what lies behind all of these things—our views of the universe and of time, history, reality, and whether there is a God, gods, or nothing behind it all? And what does it say of how we are to understand the ideal of an “examined life,” a “life worth living,” and how we live well in our brief stay on earth?
If, as people commonly say today, our brief lives are simply “the dash between the two dates on our gravestones,” what hope is there of investing that brief dash with significance? There are truths that no one can answer for us. We must each face them alone. Our own mortality is one of them. How challenging to stand and ask as Tolstoy asked himself, “What will come of my entire life? . . . Is there any meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the inevitability of death which awaits me?”2 And how terrible to come close to the end of life and have to say with Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, “What if my whole life has been wrong?”3
In short, our human challenge is to make the most of our time on earth and to know how to do it. Time and space are the warp and woof of the reality in which we live our brief lives as humans, but they are different. When Alexander the Great asked Diogenes if there was anything he could do for him, the flinty old philosopher answered famously, “Stand out of my light!” We can occupy part of space exclusively and block someone else’s access, but no one occupies time exclusively. Time is our “commons,” the open and shared ground for all who are alive at any moment to enjoy together.
More importantly, we humans can conquer space, and we do so easily and routinely with our bulldozers, our cranes, our smart phones, our jets, and all the shiny achievements of our technological civilization. But we cannot conquer time. Time does not lie still before us like space, for it is within us as well as around us, and it is never stationary. It moves, and in one direction only—onwards and unstoppable. In the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, philosopher and rabbi, “Man transcends space, and time transcends man.”4
Importantly too, the comparative ease of our conquest of the world of physical space disguises a vital fact: our conquests of space are always at the expense of using up time. We are spending our time even if we twiddle our thumbs and do nothing, and energetic activism does not solve the problem. We can build “bigger and bigger barns” or bigger and bigger empires, whether political or commercial, but there is always a day or a night when life ends, and then, as Jesus of Nazareth warned, “your soul is required of you” (Lk 12:20). Which means that the time we have spent in doing anything is the real cost and the proper key to assessing whether we have gained or lost and the effort has been worthwhile. However effortless-seeming our accomplishments, we always pay for them at the expense of our greatest challenge and the most insoluble mystery of our lives—time. “What does it profit a man,” Jesus also declared, “to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?” (Mk 8:36).
Look around the world today at all our high-striding billionaires, multibillionaires, and soon-to-be trillionaires. They may be titans of finance or technology or political power, but face-to-face with time they are the same little people, the same mortals we all are. Whatever their plans and their dreams for the future, whatever their intentions and their resolutions, whatever their energy and their resources, death waits for them at the end as for us all, and death is therefore truly humanity’s “final enemy,” whatever the hopes of the life-extension dreamers. Heroes or villains, saints or sinners, world-famous or unknown, we all die in the end. All human life is time bound: it always has been, and it always will be. Our basic condition is what the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy called “time-torn.”5
