Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Campion

Campion packs a whole memento mori into a couplet that moves like the thing it names: time. The line doesn’t stroll; it flies. “Time’s fatal wings” fuses speed with threat, turning chronology into a predator. “Do ever forward fly” is almost musical in its insistence, a rhythmic push that won’t let you linger on the consonants. You can hear the composer’s mind at work: the phrasing is engineered to feel inevitable, like a cadence you can’t avoid.

The real bite lands in the second half, where he converts living into subtraction. “To every day we live, a day we die” isn’t just a gloomy paradox; it’s accounting. Existence becomes a ledger in which each sunrise is also a withdrawal. That’s the subtext: you don’t merely spend time, time spends you. The syntax makes it transactional, almost fair, which is precisely what makes it chilling. No villain, no catastrophe, just the clean arithmetic of being alive.

Context matters. Campion is writing in a late Elizabethan/Jacobean world steeped in plague cycles, short life expectancies, and a Christian imagination trained on death as both judgment and release. His audience wouldn’t need persuading that life is brief; they needed language that could make the briefness feel immediate. By giving time wings, Campion offers a visual that outruns philosophy. It’s not a meditation you ponder; it’s a clock you hear ticking in your chest.