There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
—Shakespeare
Man is his own star, and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate,
Nothing for him falls early or too late;
Our acts our angels are, for good or ill;
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
—Beaumont and Fletcher
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar,
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home.
—Wordsworth
Be wise to-day; 'tis madness to defer;
Next day the fatal precedent will plead;
Thus on, till-wisdom is pushed out of life.
Procrastination is the thief of time;
Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
And to the mercies of a moment leaves
The vast concerns of an eternal scene.
—Edward Young
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,