The caterpillar preys at the heart of the rose and eats the leaves. Time devours everything. It wrecks all. The horizon alludes man’s pursuit and recedes before him. Mirages mock his eyes. Ever-fleeting and ever-flying is time. Time is all-conquering. The proud is laid low in dust by him. The tyrant Zohak, before whom the heavens did quake, fell on his face in the dust at the bidding of time.

Let time never lag with me. Let me ever be busy with some useful work. Let me not waste my time. Let me not dream away my days. Let not vacillation and instability hinder my onward march. Let not my present be darkened by the clouds of the past, which the horizon is now clearing. Let me not ponder over vanished dreams of the past. Let not the spell of the past be thick upon me. The past is past. Futile it is to make it the present. My yesterday is the thing of the past. I have to turn backwards to look at it, when forward is my move. The past is dead. The present and future have I to create anew. They only matter to me.

If life is to be hard upon me, let it be in my youthful past. Let the future bring to me the happiest time of my life. Spare me the agony to live on the memory of happiness that I had in my youthful life of prosperity, now lost, leaving me in the midst of hardship and adversity.

Man knows not when he sleeps, whether he would wake up alive. Slowly does life begin to ebb away from him. The soul drops its vesture of flesh. Let me not fall into dotage. Let me strive and let me hope and let me work all my waking hours and all the days of my life and let me grow, until deathless time makes me sleep the sleep, of death.

Unbegotten Thyself, Thou art the begetter of all. Unmoved Thyself, Thou art source of all movement. Thou dost see everything in the whole universe at one and the same moment. Thou dost ordain when every drop of rain shall fall. Thou alone shalt endure through all time. Time touches Thee not. Help me to make the best use of my time, as good and great ones of all times have done, O Thou Sovereign of earth and heaven!