TIME QUOTES VI
quotations about time
There is a balance, a kind of standoff between the time continuum and the human entity, our frail bundle of soma and psyche. We eventually succumb to time, it's true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going. Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second.... We were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
Man hath no Heaven and Time's coast is chartless.
He speeds; we pass away!
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"The Lake"
Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
Time is a measure of space, just as a range-finder is a measure of space, but measuring locks us into the place we measure.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune
We grasp at Time, but cannot hold
One minute of his treasured hour;
He tarries not, though oft we pray
That he will rest in youth's bright bower.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Time's Ravages"
Still Time, great wizard of this earth,
Who holds o'er human minds such sway!
Oft bids to scenes of later birth
Old recollections to give way.
ANNE S. BUSHBY
"Florinda"
Time sure kicks the shit out of people.
DAN SIMMONS
Lovedeath
How unthinking must those unhappy persons be, who make it a common excuse for idle and pernicious amusements, that they do it to kill Time.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Time is their tyrant: it fails them, it escapes them; they can neither expand it nor cut it short.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
In the dark attics of our minds, all times mingle.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
Time perfects men as well as destroys them.
CHANAKYA
Vridda-Chanakya
The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have.
ROLLO MAY
Man's Search for Himself
Who shall contend with time--unvanquished time, the conqueror of conquerors, and lord of desolation?
HENRY KIRKE WHITE
"Time", The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White
If thou takest time into thy affairs, it will allay and arrange all things.
APOLLODORUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
Time never works. It eats, and undermines, and rots, and rusts, and destroys. But it never works. It only gives us an opportunity to work.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Time depends on the position of the observer and the direction in which he looks.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
For more than two thousand years, the world's great minds have argued about the essence of time. Is it finite or infinite? Does it flow like a river or is it granular, proceeding in small bits, like sand trickling through an hourglass? And what is the present? Is now an indivisible instant, a line of vapor between the past and the future? Or is it an instant that can be measured--and, if so, how long is it? And what lies between the instants?
ALAN BURDICK
"The Secret Life of Time", The New Yorker, December 19, 2016
The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology.
SEAN M. CARROLL
Scientific American, June 2008
Our time is brief, and it will pass no matter what we do. So let us have purpose in spending it. Let us spend it so that our time matters to each of us, and matters to all those whose lives we touch.
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life