Time & Perspective Quote by Corita Kent

Corita Kent’s line reads like a mantra, but it’s really a small act of rebellion against the American obsession with outcomes. “Succession of moments” shrinks life down to a chain of present-tense units, stripping away the false solidity of “someday” and “finally.” Then she slips in the quiet provocation: success isn’t the trophy at the end; it’s the attention you can muster right now. In an achievement culture, that’s almost subversive.

The phrasing matters. “To live each one” implies a discipline, not a vibe. It’s not telling you to feel grateful; it’s asking you to show up. Kent doesn’t romanticize the moment as blissful - she treats it as the basic material of a life, like ink or color. That tracks with her identity as an artist: making, noticing, repeating. The sentence has the cadence of studio practice, where progress is measured less by grand breakthroughs than by sustained presence.

Context sharpens the edge. Kent was a Catholic sister turned iconic pop-inflected artist-teacher, working through the churn of the 1960s and 70s, when politics, mass media, and consumer language were colliding in public. Her work often borrowed the bright surfaces of advertising to smuggle in moral attention. This quote does something similar: it uses the loaded word “succeed” to redirect ambition away from status and toward lived experience. Success, in her framing, is not escape from time but intimacy with it.