Time & Perspective Quote by James Hilton

Hilton’s line reads like a quiet revolt against the accountant’s worldview: the idea that a life can be audited into meaning. “Counting the cost” and “paying the price” are the language of caution, compromise, and risk management; he frames them as necessary training wheels, useful up to a point, then suddenly inadequate. The pivot - “Surely there comes a time” - is doing the rhetorical heavy lifting. It implies moral adulthood, a threshold moment when deliberation gives way to commitment.

The subtext is less “be noble” than “stop bargaining with yourself.” Hilton isn’t denying that sacrifices exist; he’s suggesting that when a purpose is real enough, the sacrifice stops feeling like a transaction. That’s why “value” lands so hard here. Not market value, not social approval, but ultimate value: a standard that can’t be cashed out into comfort, safety, or even success. It’s a rebuke to the mindset that keeps a person perpetually on the verge of action, forever negotiating the terms.

As a novelist writing through the first half of the twentieth century - war, economic upheaval, the collapse of old certainties - Hilton understood how easily people get trained into scarcity thinking. This sentence offers an escape hatch: stop asking what it will cost you, start asking what it will count for. It works because it flatters neither heroism nor martyrdom; it argues for a colder, cleaner form of courage: choosing a life by its meaning, not its manageable downside.