Time & Perspective Quote by Jerome Hines

Hines is selling a disciplined kind of joy, not the bumper-sticker version. As an opera singer who spent decades training, touring, and aging in a body that’s also an instrument, he’s speaking from a life where “the past” isn’t nostalgia - it’s technique, scars, and hard-won craft. “Cherishes the precious lessons” sounds tender, but it’s also practical: keep what trained you, don’t keep what traps you. The word “precious” quietly filters memory into something curated, not hoarded.

Then he snaps the sentence forward with “lives vigorously in the present,” a phrase that rejects both regret and reverence-as-paralysis. “Vigorously” is doing a lot of work: it implies risk, breath, and muscle. In performance, you can’t inhabit last night’s success or failure; you have to place the note now. Hines’s line reads like backstage advice dressed as philosophy: respect your rehearsal, then forget it the moment the curtain goes up.

The subtext is a warning aimed at two common artist traps. One is sentimentality - the idea that the past was purer, audiences better, your voice stronger. The other is amnesia - pretending experience doesn’t matter because reinvention feels sexy. Hines splits the difference. He offers happiness as a verb, earned by balancing continuity and presence. It’s a worldview shaped by long careers: you don’t outsmart time, you negotiate with it, taking its lessons and refusing its leash.