Life & Wisdom Quote by Tertullian

Austere and almost managerial, Tertullian’s line treats procrastination not as a vice but as a moral technology: delay as discipline. The sentence is built like a legal brief, with its paired anxieties laid out in neat symmetry - hurry risks shoddy incompletion, while an endless perfectionism risks getting lost in the work itself. He’s not romanticizing slowness; he’s warning that speed and drift are twin failures of judgment.

The subtext is early Christian realism about human limitation. Tertullian wrote in a world where theological disputes weren’t salon games; they shaped communal boundaries, authority, and sometimes survival under pressure. In that setting, “postpone” signals prudence: wait until you can act with clarity, lest zeal produce half-made doctrine or sprawling arguments that never resolve. There’s also a quiet critique of rhetorical showmanship. Tertullian, famously combative and rhetorically gifted, knows how easily brilliance can become a maze: you can “wander too long” in the performance of completion, turning spiritual labor into an endless display of ingenuity.

What makes the line work is its calibrated suspicion of impulse. It doesn’t preach patience as a virtue in the abstract; it frames timing as an ethical choice with measurable costs. The rhythm of “either...or...” reads like a checklist for conscience, a reminder that the enemy isn’t only laziness. Sometimes the temptation is urgency, the intoxicating belief that speed equals conviction. Tertullian’s counsel is colder than comfort and sharper than self-help: delay can be an act of responsibility, not avoidance.