quotations about time
Time, that aged nurse,
Rocked me to patience.
JOHN KEATS
Endymion
Days, months, years fly away, and irrecoverably sink in the abyss of time.
JEAN DE LA BRUYERE
attributed, Thoughts Moral and Divine
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
Time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place, we advance, stop and retreat according to his orders, our mistake lies in imagining that we can catch him out.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
The Cave
Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Troilus and Cressida
Time has laid his hand
Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it,
But as a harper lays his open palm
Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
The Golden Legend
Time goes, you say? ah no! Alas, time stays, we go.
GREGORY BENFORD
Furious Gulf
Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular -- an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Sexing the Cherry
There is nothing fatherly about time and what it does to us, either.
DEAN KOONTZ
Forever Odd
Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me.
J. M. COETZEE
In the Heart of the Country
Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away, but which nevertheless will make at the end of it, no small deduction from the life of man.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Time as he grows old teaches all things.
AESCHYLUS
Prometheus Bound
The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.
HORACE
Epistles
That was the truly horrifying thing about it: the sense of time as an enemy, to be fought tooth and nail--but there was so much of it; you killed an hour, but what good did that do when there were thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions more hours just waiting to take its place?
K. J. PARKER
The Escapement
I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
Time: the word tolled like the bells of a church.
JAMES BALDWIN
If Beale Street Could Talk
Time is only an illusion produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal duration, and it does not exist where no consciousness exists in which the illusion can be produced; but "lies asleep."
HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY
An Abridgement of the Secret Doctrine
The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Countess Cathleen
Man seems to be deficient in nothing so much as he is in time.
ZENO
attributed, Day's Collacon
When then time is passing, it may be perceived and measured; but when it is past, it cannot, because it is not.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions