“L'Art est long et le Temps est court.”Gustave Flaubert · Corespondență · 1875 · Louise Colet, 13 septembre 1852
Mastery demands more time than life gives, so start anyway.
Flaubert takes an ancient aphorism, from Hippocrates, and rewrites it for an age of perfectionism: he himself spent weeks on a single page. The mechanism is a mathematical inequality: mastery demands thousands of hours, while the budget of time is fixed and unshared. A painter who starts at forty knows she will never reach where a twenty-year-old would, and keeps going anyway.
Why it matters It speaks to anyone delaying a start because it is too late: it is both a warning and a permission to work seriously with the time that exists.