"The unforgiving minute" is a metaphor for the length of time individuals have to live in the poem. That minute, the whole amount of time humans have to live, is merciless since no one gets a second opportunity. The phrase comes from a 17th-century English poem by Henry Vaughan called "The Life of Man". In this work, the author compares the shortness of human life to the immense scale of nature - noting that both people and planets are doomed to die. He also believes that each moment contains a part of everyone who has ever lived or will live, and thus losing even a minute means losing something irreplaceable. Minutes are important because they are small segments of time. With minutes, we can measure speed, time, distance, etc. A minute is the amount of time it takes to say "one" out loud. It is used when counting backward or forward from some point in the past or future. For example, you might tell your friend that you will call him at 4:15 PM because it is then exactly one hour before he should get home. Minutes are very important because they represent a large portion of our lives. Humans have only been able to prove that they are capable of living longer than a month at a time. However, due to health issues and problems surviving longer than a month away from home, most humans only live about 30 years.