Time & Perspective Quote by Jeremy Taylor

Time is doing the moral work here: it shrinks, it presses, it terrifies. Jeremy Taylor, a 17th-century Anglican divine with a poet’s ear for dread, frames human life as a brutally short leasehold whose consequences balloon into the infinite. The line is a pressure device disguised as theology. By yoking "short time" to "eternity", Taylor turns everyday delay into spiritual malpractice. Procrastination isn’t merely impractical; it becomes catastrophic.

The intent is pastoral, but it’s also disciplinary. Taylor isn’t offering metaphysical trivia about the afterlife; he’s trying to shape behavior in the present. The subtext reads like a sermon aimed at the comfortable sinner and the distracted believer: you do not have the luxury of drifting. The sentence is built to make "later" feel like a lie people tell themselves when they want to keep their habits and still claim their faith.

Context matters. Taylor lived through England’s civil wars, the collapse of old certainties, and the hard churn of regime changes that made mortality feel less abstract. His Anglican tradition leaned hard on practical devotion: prayer, repentance, and moral reform as daily labor. In that world, the afterlife wasn’t a vague consolation; it was a looming audit.

Rhetorically, the line works because it borrows the authority of "God hath given" while refusing comfort. Gift language usually softens; Taylor uses it to sharpen. Life is a grant, not a possession, and the grant comes with stakes so disproportionate they produce urgency. The sentence doesn’t argue you into belief; it corners you into action.