"Tomorrow is the day when idlers work, and fools reform, and mortal men lay hold on heaven"

“Tomorrow is the day when idlers work, and fools reform, and mortal men lay hold on heaven,” writes Aulus Persius Flaccus, drawing attention to the perennial human tendency to defer action and self-improvement. The aphorism uses “tomorrow” as a symbol for procrastination, a day perpetually postponed, inhabited by potential achievements, and the hope for transformation that rarely arrives. For idlers, those who shirk their responsibilities or fail to engage purposefully with their lives, labor is always scheduled for that later, undefined day. By placing their diligence in a future that never comes, they absolve themselves of guilt for inaction in the present.

The “fools” are not identified by their lack of intelligence, but by their repeated insistence that reform, the act of changing bad habits, adopting better ones, or correcting moral failings, belongs to the domain of tomorrow. Of course, this promise of reform is empty if consistently deferred; it becomes the hallmark of self-deception. For Persius, procrastination is folly because it masks avoidance as hope, and in the process, erodes genuine self-betterment.

The phrase “mortal men lay hold on heaven” is perhaps the most profound, suggesting the ultimate aspirations and spiritual hopes of humanity. Spiritual perfection, virtue, the highest goods, these too can be perennially pushed into the future under the pretense of impending effort or moral awakening. Rather than striving for transcendence in the present, people comfort themselves by envisioning future states of grace, heaven, or enlightenment just out of reach. Persius’s maxim serves as a satirical admonition. By framing tomorrow as the horizon for all that we aspire to do and be, he exposes the absurdity of inaction, urging us to recognize the value of immediacy, and the emptiness of promises made to a day that never comes.