Time & Perspective Quote by Thomas Kempis

Anxiety is treated here less like a warning system and more like a thief: it raids tomorrow and leaves you poorer today. Thomas a Kempis, writing out of the late medieval Christian tradition (and most famously associated with The Imitation of Christ), aims his sentence at a particular spiritual habit - the compulsive rehearsal of the future as if forethought were the same thing as control. The line isn’t tender; it’s diagnostic. The question form corneres the reader into conceding the meager payoff: when you anxiously forecast, you don’t purchase safety, you prepay grief.

The intent is disciplinary, almost monastic. Kempis is speaking to people for whom the inner life is a battleground of attention: what you dwell on becomes what you serve. “Sorrow upon sorrow” is not poetic excess; it’s a description of stacking pain in advance. You suffer the trouble you actually have, then you manufacture a second version of it in imagination, often harsher because it has no boundaries. Anxiety, in this view, is a kind of counterfeit suffering - emotionally vivid, spiritually unproductive.

The subtext is also theological: time belongs to God, not to your mental simulations. Future-fear is framed as a subtle form of distrust, a refusal to live where grace is available (the present) and an insistence on living where you have no agency (the imagined future). In a world of plague, instability, and short life expectancy, Kempis isn’t naïve about suffering. He’s arguing that anticipating catastrophe doesn’t make you brave; it just multiplies your burdens before they arrive.