quotations about time
You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
T. S. ELIOT
"The Dry Salvages", Four Quartets
And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
MILAN KUNDERA
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Time cannot be spurred on like a horse.
KOBO ABE
The Woman in the Dunes
Time is the school in which we learn.
Time is the fire in which we burn.
JOAN DIDION
The Year of Magical Thinking
The fluid cradle of events (time).
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
Time ... thou ceaseless lackey to eternity.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Rape of Lucrece
A proper disposition of time leaves a man at leisure in the very bustle of affairs; without delaying the attention of his concerns to the last or giving them unnecessary application at first: it affords a season for everything by affording everything its proper season.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
Go to the man on the street and ask whether time has a direction, whether the future is different from the past, and whether time doesn't march on toward the future. That's the natural view. The more interesting view is how the physicists manage to convince themselves that time doesn't have a direction.
TIM MAUDLIN
"A Defense of the Reality of Time", Quanta Magazine, May 16, 2017
Time can also be a place.... Everything depends on where you are standing, on where you look or what you hear. The measure of it is found in consciousness itself.
FRANK HERBERT
God Emperor of Dune
For though time may seem to drag slowly on
Before you will know it, time will be gone.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"The Voice of the Clock"
How Time doth lash us with sharp pains,
Set loose our teeth, snatch wisps of hair, dim eyes --
And finally bend our backs toward earth
To find the fittest place for burial.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
"Of Time", Cloudrifts at Twilight
Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence -- neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish -- it is an imponderably valuable gift.
MAYA ANGELOU
Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now
Time is the chrysalis of eternity.
RICHTER
attributed, Day's Collacon
Well, ultimately nothing lasts. Everything is temporal, but some things last longer than others.
WALTER BARGEN
Riverfront Times, September 29, 2009
When things don't please you, the best medicine is to swallow a little tincture of time.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit at Rest
By the 1930s, wristwatches were the norm and the pocket watch was an anachronism. Time, itself, had become a human appendage.
DEREK THOMPSON
"A Brief Economic History of Time", The Atlantic, December 21, 2016
Days, months, years fly away, and irrecoverably sink in the abyss of time.
JEAN DE LA BRUYERE
attributed, Thoughts Moral and Divine
I've always been keenly aware of the passing of time. I've always thought that I was old. Even when I was twelve, I thought it was awful to be thirty. I felt that something was lost. At the same time, I was aware of what I could gain, and certain periods of my life have taught me a great deal. But, in spite of everything, I've always been haunted by the passing of time and by the fact that death keeps closing in on us.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
interview, The Paris Review, spring-summer 1965