How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

Bennett urges us to use that time to better ourselves, with great art or actions that make our lives deeper and richer, which in turn allows us to cherish and savor each hour of our day, rather than feel like time is slipping through our fingers.

and that the primal cause of that inconvenient dissatisfaction is the feeling that you are every day leaving undone something which you would like to do, and which, indeed, you are always hoping to do when you have “more time”;

As I have previously said, the chief beauty about the constant supply of time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoiled, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your career.

A glorious failure leads to nothing; a petty success may lead to a success that is not petty.

If a man makes two-thirds of his existence subservient to one-third, for which admittedly he has no absolutely feverish zest, how can he hope to live fully and completely? He cannot.

During those sixteen hours he is free; he is not a wage-earner; he is not preoccupied by monetary cares; he is just as good as a man with a private income.

The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.

And without the power to concentrate—that is to say, without the power to dictate to the brain its task and to ensure obedience—true life is impossible.

If they genuinely believed in the moral excellence of burglary, penal servitude would simply mean so many happy years for them; all martyrs are happy, because their conduct and their principles agree.

all martyrs are happy, because their conduct and their principles agree.