Time & Perspective Quote by Michael Korda

“Act well at the moment” is a novelist’s antidote to the modern itch for legacy. Korda’s line refuses the grand, foggy promises of history and relocates morality in the smallest unit of time: now. It’s a tight, almost cinematic instruction, as if ethics were blocking and timing rather than a lifelong manifesto. The phrasing is telling. “Act well” is less about inner purity than performance under pressure; it’s virtue as conduct, not confessional identity. That makes it bracingly practical, and slightly unsentimental.

The second clause pulls a clever rhetorical trick: it smuggles eternity into the present without asking you to believe in angels or monuments. “All eternity” reads like metaphysics, but the subtext is social and psychological. A single decent action doesn’t just disappear; it echoes through consequences, memory, and narrative. People repeat what you did, model it, retaliate against it, forgive because of it. Even if no one records it, you do. One moment becomes part of the story you’re forced to live with.

Korda, who has spent a career around public figures and the machinery that manufactures reputations, sounds suspicious of posterity’s scorekeeping. He offers a shortcut: stop writing your epitaph and handle the scene in front of you. It’s also a quiet rebuke to the era’s performative goodness: chasing “eternity” through branding is the wrong direction. If you want permanence, earn it the only way time ever allows - by getting the moment right.