Time & Perspective Quote by Fulton Oursler

Oursler lands the blow by hijacking a sacred image and turning it inward. “We crucify ourselves” doesn’t just mean we suffer; it accuses us of collaboration in our own torment. The line borrows the Crucifixion’s moral gravity, but the thieves aren’t villains out there in the world. They’re time-based emotions we keep close, letting them flank us until the present has nowhere to breathe. That’s the trick: regret and fear are framed as petty criminals, not profound truths. They steal our attention, then we supply the nails.

The specific intent feels pastoral without being pious. Oursler, a midcentury American writer steeped in a culture where biblical literacy was common, uses religious shorthand as a psychological intervention. He’s not trying to win a theological argument; he’s trying to snap readers out of rumination and dread by making those habits look ridiculous and self-destructive. The subtext is modern and almost cognitive-behavioral: your suffering is real, but the mind is also a machine for replay and projection, and you’re letting that machine run your life.

Context matters. In the decades around the Great Depression and World War II, “fear of tomorrow” wasn’t an abstract anxiety; it was a national atmosphere. Pairing it with “regret for yesterday” creates a full trap: nostalgia curdled into guilt on one side, uncertainty weaponized on the other. Oursler’s line works because it doesn’t flatter the reader. It grants the pain, then insists we’re the ones keeping it holy.