Time & Perspective Quote by George A. Smith

Moral transformation, in George A. Smith's telling, is rarely a thunderclap. It’s a near-silent internal pivot: “a moment’s listening,” “a single and quiet inclination.” The phrasing refuses drama on purpose. Smith, writing as a 19th-century clergyman, is selling an ethic of intimacy over spectacle - salvation as attention, not performance. The quietness is the point: conscience doesn’t need the crowd’s permission.

The line works because it reframes agency. Big life changes are often narrated as external events - disaster, revelation, conversion. Smith shifts the causal center inward, to a fleeting act of receptivity. “Listening” makes conscience sound less like a rulebook and more like a voice you can ignore, mishear, or finally grant the floor. That choice is both empowering and indicting: if lives can be changed so quickly, then lives can also be deformed by the same quickness - by the thousand tiny times we don’t listen.

There’s also a pastoral practicality here. In an era of revival meetings and public professions of faith, Smith’s emphasis on the “quiet inclination” subtly critiques the temptation to equate volume with sincerity. He’s arguing for the moral significance of private mental posture: the barely perceptible lean toward honesty, restraint, repair. The subtext is a theology of micro-decisions. What looks like a minor inner adjustment becomes the hinge on which character swings, and that makes everyday conscience not a background noise but the main plot.