Time & Perspective Quote by Dalai Lama

A gentle line that lands like a reprimand: stop outsourcing your life to imaginary calendars. The Dalai Lama frames time in a stark triad - Yesterday, Tomorrow, Today - then strips two of them of any practical power. It is rhetoric as spiritual ergonomics: reduce the clutter, narrow the field of action, make “now” feel unavoidable. That’s why the sentence works. It doesn’t argue against regret or anxiety; it quietly declares them administratively useless.

The subtext is Buddhist but broadly legible. “Yesterday” gestures at attachment and rumination, the mind replaying what cannot be edited. “Tomorrow” signals grasping and dread, the mind rehearsing futures it can’t command. By labeling both “days... that nothing can be done,” he turns metaphysical insight into a productivity maxim, then refills the emptied space with verbs that sound like a secular creed: Love, Believe, Do, Live. The capitalization reads like a liturgy for modern life, designed to travel well on posters and phone screens, but it also mirrors how spiritual practice often works: take the overwhelming and render it actionable.

As a leader in exile whose public role has long required moral steadiness under pressure, the context matters. This isn’t just self-help optimism; it’s a disciplined refusal to let political loss or anticipated conflict dictate one’s inner life. “Mostly Live” is the quiet punchline: beyond sentiment (“Love”) and conviction (“Believe”) and effort (“Do”), he’s insisting on presence as resistance - not dramatic, not naïve, just insistently, stubbornly human.