Urgency Quotes

To-morrow even may bring the final reckoning.

Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it!

Gandalf: Three hundred lives of men I have walked this earth and now I have no time.

We are running out of time

Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.

You may delay, but time will not.

The only question is whether you’re going to do it today or tomorrow. If you keep saying you’re going to do it tomorrow,you’ll never do it. You have to get on it today.

But there are certain very practical things American Negro writers can do. And must do. There's a song that says, "the time ain't long." That song is right. Something has got to change in America-and change soon. We must help that change to come.

I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war... But we have no more urgent task.

Time is really the only capital that any human being has, and the only thing he can't afford to lose.

Think for tomorrow but act for today.

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy

Someone could walk into this room and say your life is on fire.

Develop a sense of urgency in your life.

How wonderful it is that we can start doing good at this very moment.

All of us have been dying, hour by hour, since the moment we were born. Realizing this, let all things be placed in their proper perspective. . . . Remember, it is always later than you think.

We come humbly to say to the men in the forefront of our government that the civil rights issue is not an Ephemeral, evanescent domestic issue that can be kicked about by reactionary guardians of the status quo; it is rather an eternal moral issue which may well determine the destiny of our nation in the ideological struggle with communism. The hour is late. The clock of destiny is ticking out. We must act now, before it is too late.

If this was the last day of your life, would you spend it the way you're spending today?

You knew the sweetness of now, now, TONIGHT! who cares for tomorrow, tomorrow is nothing, yesterday is over and done, tonight live, tonight!

The words 'bad timing' came to be ghosts haunting our every move in Birmingham. Yet people who used this argument were ignorant of the background of our planning...they did not realize that it was ridiculous to speak of timing when the clock of history showed that the Negro had already suffered one hundred years of delay.

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing.

There is a time for silence. There is a time for waiting you turn. But if you know how you feel and you so clearly know what you need to say you'll know it. I don't think you should wait. I think you should speak now.

Why wait to be memorable?

Go Sir, gallop and don't forget that the world was made in six days. You can ask me for anything but not time.

Nothing so focuses the mind as the prospect of being hanged.

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. . . . Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, 'Too late.' ... Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.

Never awake me when you have good news to announce, because with good news nothing presses; but when you have bad news, arouse me immediately, for then there is not an instant to be lost.

Already, it is later than you think for your earthly life at best, is only a blink of an eye between two eternities.

If not us, who? And if not now, when?

That window is closing. . . . Now, the clock is ticking. . . . We're not going to have these talks just drag out in a stalling process. . . . We haven't given away anything - other than the opportunity for us to negotiate

Nothing has more strength than dire necessity.

Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.

Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?

I don't think that there's a hard-and-fast deadline. . . .What we have said all along is that this is not an open-ended process, we are not in this just to talk for talk's sake. . . . We expect prompt, concrete steps to be taken over the next couple of weeks.

A man says to me, 'Can you explain the seven trumpets of the Revelation?' No, but I can blow one in your ear, and warn you to escape from the wrath to come.

Never before have we had so little time in which to do so much.

I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem just to avoid violence.

We live in a time-crunched world, and just about everything we do seems to be urgent.

Do not act as if you had a thousand years to live.

Gather quicklyOut of darknessAll the songs you knowAnd throw them at the sunBefore they meltLike snow.

The problem of the negro is so criminal that many individuals and organizations are going to have to sacrifice what they call their organizational principles if someone comes up with a solution that will really solve the problem.

The stations of uncensored expression are closing down; the lights are going out; but there is still time for those to whom freedom and parliamentary government mean something, to consult together. Let me, then, speak in truth and earnestness while time remains.

To be always intending to make a new and better life but never to find time to set about it is as to put off eating and drinking and sleeping from one day to the next until you're dead.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

If you know that a thing is unrighteous, then use all dispatch in putting an end to it--why wait till next year?

Death tugs at my ear and says, 'Live. I am coming.

No more busy work. No more hiding from success. Leave time, leave space, to grow. Now. Now! Not tomorrow!

There is an immeasurable distance between late and too late.

Life is like riding in a taxi. Whether you are going anywhere or not, the meter keeps ticking.

Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.

The 'tide in the affairs of men' does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: 'Too late...'

Excitement must lead to immediate action or you will lose the power of momentum. More dreams die because we fail to seize the moment. Do it now!

Haste is needful in a desperate case.

Oh! That was poetry!" said Pippin. "Do you really mean to start before the break of day?

This nation asks for action, and action now.

When your dawn theater sounds to clear your sinuses: don't delay. Jump. Those voices may be gone before you hit the shower to align your wits. Speed is everything. The 90-mph dash to your machine is a sure cure for life rampant and death most real. Make haste to live. Oh, God, yes. Live. And write. With great haste.

Life does not wait: Whether we spend our lives meaningfully or not, the time will be used up moment by moment.

Anything I do today, I regard as urgent.

A life of fulfillment is one in which we put urgency in its place and remember that the ultimate target is to spend our lives doing the things we believe are most important to us.