Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael Ende

Ende frames time as the ultimate plot twist hiding in plain sight: the one mystery everyone “knows” and almost nobody interrogates. The sly move is calling it both “great” and “quite commonplace,” yoking awe to banality. That tension is the engine of the line. Time isn’t obscure like dark matter; it’s so omnipresent it becomes invisible, and Ende is accusing us of a kind of perceptual laziness. We don’t fail to understand time because it’s too complex; we fail because familiarity breeds intellectual numbness.

The intent feels less like philosophy for its own sake and more like a storyteller’s warning. Ende, best known for The Neverending Story and Momo, repeatedly treats time as something social and moral, not merely mechanical. In Momo, time is literally stolen, turned into a commodity by bureaucratic “time-savers,” a parable about modern life’s obsession with efficiency. Read against that context, “seldom rates a second thought” lands as cultural critique: a society can be so busy measuring minutes that it forgets to notice what minutes are doing to a life.

Subtext: time is the medium of meaning, the silent editor of every relationship and ambition. Ende’s phrasing suggests that our default stance toward time is surrender. We “take for granted” what’s actually shaping us, and that unexamined acceptance is precisely how time gets monetized, scheduled, optimized, and drained. The quote works because it reframes the most ordinary fact of existence as a neglected ethical question: not what time is, but what we let it do to us.