Procrastination is the thief of time

The English writer Edward Young, who coined this saying, published The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality, more simply known as Night-Thoughts, in 1742. Although Young isn’t as widely as contemporaries like Pope and Samuel Johnson, he was revered by them and Johnson called him ‘was a man of genius and a poet’. The Night-Thoughts poem itself is a major work and has been described as the 18th century’s greatest long poem. Long is unarguable; it consists of nearly 10,000 lines of blank verse. It is in nine sections – the ‘Nights’ of the title and was published in serial form between 1742 and 1746.

The poem involves a nocturnal speaker grieving over the deaths of a child, wife and a friend and finding consolation in Christian thoughts. The ‘procrastination is the thief of time’ line appears towards the beginning of the work:

Be wise to-day; ’tis madness to defer;
Next day the fatal precedent will plead;
Thus on, till wisdom is push’d out of life.
Procrastination is the thief of time;
Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
And to the mercies of a moment leaves
The vast concerns of an eternal scene.

A similar thought, published in a work that would have been known to Young is found in Robert Greene’s Gwydonius, 1584:

You shall finde that delaie breedes daunger, & that procrastination in perils is but the mother of mishap.