佚名/Anonymous
“Time,”says the proverb, “is money.”This means that every moment well spent may put some money into our pockets. If our time is usefully employed, it will either turn out some useful and important piece of work which will fetch its price in the market, or it will add to our experience and increase our capacities so as to enable us to earn money when the proper opportunity comes. Let those who think nothing of wasting time remember this.
Our life is nothing more than our time. To kill time is therefore a form of suicide. We are shocked when we think of death, and we spare no pains, no trouble, and no expense to preserve life. But we are too often indifferent to the loss of an hour or of a day, forgetting that our life is the sum total of the days and of the hours we live. A day or an hour wasted is therefore so much life forfeited. Our life is a brief span measuring some seventy or eighty years in all. But nearly one third of this has to be spent in sleep; some years have to be spent over our meals; some in making journeys on land and voyages by sea; some in merrymaking; some in watching over the sick-beds of our nearest and dearest relatives. Now if all these years were to be deducted from the term over which our life extends, we shall find about twenty or thirty years at our disposal for active work. Whoever remembers this can never willingly waste a single moment of his life.
All time is precious, but the time of our childhood and of our youth is more precious than any other portion of our existence. For those are the periods when alone we can acquire knowledge and develop our capacities. If we allow these morning hours of life to slip away, we shall never be able to recoup the loss. Just as money laid out at interest doubles and trebles itself in time, so the precious hours of childhood any youth, if properly used, will yield us incalculable advantages.
諺語說：“時間就是金錢。”這句話的意思是，有效地利用每一分鍾，就可能讓我們增加財富。如果我們充分利用了時間，生產一些實用的東西，到市場上賣掉，會賺些錢，同時豐富我們的經驗，增長我們的才智，這就是說，賺錢的機會成熟了。讓那些對浪費時間毫不在意的人記住這一點吧。