Time & Perspective Quote by Richard Baxter

Time, for Baxter, isnt a neutral resource; its moral currency that accrues interest or debt. The line reads like practical advice, but it carries the stern logic of a 17th-century Puritan pastor addressing people who believed eternity pressed against the back of every ordinary hour. You dont merely waste time; you pre-spend future remorse.

The quote works because it fuses two pressures into one sentence: urgency and foresight. "Be careful" sounds like household prudence, the kind youd offer about money or fire. Then Baxter turns the screw: the standard for a worthy activity isnt pleasure, productivity, or even social approval, but whether you already know youll regret it. That "which you know" is the key. Hes not talking about mistakes made in ignorance; hes targeting the quiet, deliberate self-deception that accompanies chosen vice. The subtext is prosecutorial: youre not a victim of temptation, youre an accomplice to your own future guilt.

Context sharpens the edge. Baxter wrote in an England battered by civil war, religious upheaval, plague, and early capitalist time-discipline. His pastoral project was to make daily life legible to conscience: work, leisure, conversation, consumption, all accountable. Repentance here functions like an internal audit. The line is less about forbidding fun than about training a moral imagination that can see consequences in advance - and then act as if the unseen matters more than the immediate.