Meaning & Analysis
Act at the opportune moment; begin while conditions favor you, rather than delaying and risking loss of the chance.
Insights
Seizing opportunity
When a window opens, step through it; ripeness is brief, and hesitation converts a live option into a memory.
Kairotic judgment
Wisdom is the art of reading ‘when time comes’—recognizing the right instant (kairos) rather than counting mere duration (chronos).
Prepared readiness
Keep tools, plans, and allies in order so you can move the moment time ‘serves’; preparedness turns chance into gain.
Anti-procrastination
Waiting for a ‘better’ later wastes the usable now; the proverb cuts through dithering with a default to action.
Strategic timing
Success depends on matching action to conditions—hoisting sail with a fair wind, not after it drops.
Early modern chorus
Contemporaries put it plainly: ‘The wise and discreet man takes the time as it comes’; ‘while time serves me.’ The period’s market and seasonal rhythms made timeliness a civic virtue.
Falconry caution
Melbancke warns, ‘take time while thou hast it, the hawk may cheek that now comes fair to fist’: what is tractable now may be unmanageable later—an animal analogue of expiring chances.
Dramatic echoes
Shakespeare compresses it to ‘Take the present time,’ and Fletcher–Massinger add the fateful hinge: ‘There is an hour… to make his happiness if then he seize it.’ The hour matters more than the effort outside it.
Network of sister maxims
It aligns with tide-and-wind lore (‘Hoist your sail when the wind is fair’; ‘The tide must be taken when it comes’) and with ‘Take time by the forelock’: a whole idiom-book in praise of timely decisiveness.
Decision theory
The proverb rebalances bias: we overweight the imagined ‘option value’ of waiting and underprice opportunity cost. Unless delay clearly improves odds, acting now is rational.
Ethical boundary
‘Taking time’ is not license for rashness; it presumes adequate readiness. The virtue is prompt prudence—not impulsiveness.
Rhetorical Devices
Anaphora/parallelism
Repetition of ‘take time…’ and the twin clauses (‘when time comes / while time serves’) create a mnemonic, marching cadence.
Polyptoton
The word ‘time’ recurs in shifting relations (subject, object, servant), enriching the theme by varied grammatical roles.
Personification
‘Time serves’ casts time as a helpful attendant whose service can be accepted—or missed.
Imperative mood (implicit)
Though phrased as counsel, it functions as a command—act now—giving the line performative force.
Gnomic brevity
Short, general phrasing delivers universal applicability without context, suiting oral transmission.
Transcription
Quotations
Till tak our tyme, quhill wee may get it.
There is no remedy But to take tyme, as it doth fall.
Now is the time of hap good or ill: Venture it therefore while it is hote.
Then take time while thou hast it, the haucke may cheeke that now coms faire to fyst.
And therefore while time serues me to take the same I were best.
The wise and discreet man takes the time as it comes.
(whiles time serueth).
There is an hour in each mans life appointed To make his happiness if then he seize it.
[As in 1616 Dr.]
To make a prudent use of ones time, to take time when time is.
Shakespeare Citations
Take the present time.
Cross References
Annotations
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.