Four Thousand Weeks

Stepping into the world of finitude, by actually building the mosque, would mean confronting all that he couldn’t do. Better to cherish an ideal fantasy than to resign himself to reality, with all its limitations and unpredictability.

as if the point of your having been born still lies in the future, just over the horizon, and your life in all its fullness

Among New Age types, this same grandiosity takes the form of the belief that each of us has some cosmically significant Life Purpose, which the universe is longing for us to uncover and then to fulfil. Which is why it’s useful to begin this last stage of our journey with a blunt but unexpectedly liberating truth: that what you do with your life doe

pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have.

the most productive and successful among them generally made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than the others, so that it was much more feasible to keep going with it day after day. They cultivated the patience to tolerate the fact that they probably wouldn’t be producing very much on any individual day, with the result that they produ

By trying too hard to make the most of his time, he misses his life.

Our troubled relationship with time arises largely from this same effort to avoid the painful constraints of reality.

the deeper truth behind all this is to be found in Heidegger’s mysterious suggestion that we don’t get or have time at all – that instead we are time.

As Setiya recalls in his book Midlife, he was heading towards the age of forty when he first began to feel a creeping sense of emptiness, which he would later come to understand as the result of living a project-driven life, crammed not with atelic activities but telic ones, the primary purpose of which was to have them done, and to have achieved c