Time & Perspective Quote by Jeremy Collier

Collier’s line carries the quiet authority of a pulpit that has watched fads burn out and sins repeat. “Knowledge” here isn’t trivia or book-learning; it’s a moral and experiential sediment, the kind that settles only after life has had enough chances to correct you. By casting knowledge as a “consequence of time,” he demotes genius and inspiration and elevates endurance. Wisdom isn’t seized. It accrues. That’s a theological posture as much as a practical one: human beings are fallible, prone to haste, and in need of slow formation.

The phrasing matters. “Multitude of days” sounds biblical, echoing the cadence of Job (“with aged men is wisdom”), and Collier, a clergyman in Restoration and early 18th-century England, is writing in a culture obsessed with manners, vice, and public performance. He was famously combative about the moral tenor of the stage; he distrusted the quick, clever, crowd-pleasing line. This sentence is an anti-sparkler: it insists that the flashiest intellect is suspect if it hasn’t been tested by duration.

There’s a subtle jab in “fittest.” Not everyone learns from time; days don’t automatically ennoble you. But time is the best teacher available because it forces repetition, consequence, and humility. Collier is selling patience as a spiritual discipline and, just as pointedly, warning the young and the glib that wit without weathering is only style. In an age of instant reputations and quick scandals, he argues for the long view as an ethical corrective.