Time & Perspective Quote by Thomas Fuller

Happiness, in Fuller’s telling, isn’t a reward you earn after life finally behaves; it’s a discipline you practice while it refuses to. The sentence is built like a gentle trap: it begins with a modest “Try,” then tightens into a rebuke of delay. Fuller is not selling cheerfulness. He’s attacking a particular kind of spiritual procrastination the 17th century knew well: the habit of treating the present as raw material for a future that will supposedly arrive cleaner, calmer, more “fit” for contentment.

The key move is his phrasing “as though that time should be of another make.” “Make” suggests manufacture, composition, the grain of reality itself. He’s puncturing the fantasy that tomorrow is made from different stuff than today. That fantasy isn’t innocent; it’s a moral loophole. If happiness can be postponed until conditions are ideal, then one never has to confront the uneasy truth that the conditions are never ideal, and that the self doing the postponing will be the same self tomorrow, armed with new excuses.

Fuller writes as a clergyman in a culture steeped in providence, plague, civil conflict, and uncertainty. His counsel carries pastoral pragmatism: don’t build your inner life on a hypothetical peace treaty with the future. The closing clause, “which has already come and is ours,” lands like a receipt in the hand. You already possess the only time you’ll ever touch. The subtext is bracing: if you can’t locate a workable happiness here, you’re unlikely to discover it in any later chapter, because the author of that chapter is still you.