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To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
William James
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Valuing time is essential; wasting it is detrimental to oneself.

William James suggests that wasting time is akin to harming oneself, highlighting the importance of being mindful of how we spend our moments. He implies that our time is finite, and squandering it leads to a loss of potential and fulfillment, which can be seen as a form of self-sabotage.

Themes

TimeWastingValueLifeMindfulness

In practice

Example use cases

In a motivational speech about productivity and time management.

More from William James

Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
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The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
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All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
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The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
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It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
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As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
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