Creativity Quote by Bob Dylan

Dylan’s line lands like a shrugged confession dressed up as an accusation: the gap between our stated values and our actual behavior isn’t a mystery, it’s a habit. He splits human action into two brutally simple gears - convenience now, repentance later - and in doing so turns morality into something less heroic than logistical. Belief, in this framing, is a story we tell ourselves; convenience is the real religion, practiced daily in small choices that don’t feel like “selling out” until you total them up.

The intent isn’t to sneer at hypocrisy so much as to name the mechanism that produces it. “Seldom” is doing important work: it concedes exceptions without letting anyone off the hook. And “repent” is a loaded verb for a secular songwriter, dragging in the old language of sin and confession. Dylan’s subtext is that modern life offers endless ways to outsource responsibility - to bosses, institutions, the news cycle, the vibe - and then perform regret as a kind of moral cleanup. Repentance becomes an after-market accessory: you can feel principled without paying the price of principled action.

Contextually, it fits Dylan’s long-running suspicion of easy righteousness, including the folk era’s pressure to be a pure political instrument and the later disillusionments of the 60s and after. He watched ideals get merchandised, movements fracture, and private comfort win over public risk. The line works because it’s intimate and indicting at once: it doesn’t describe “them.” It describes the listener’s calendar.