quotations about time
At nineteen, it seems to me, one has a right to be arrogant; time has usually not begun its stealthy and rotten subtractions. It takes away your hair and your jump-shot, according to a popular country song, but in truth it takes away a lot more than that.
STEPHEN KING
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introduction, The Gunslinger
Some nights--more than I like, lately--I wake to the sound of the bedside clock. The room is dark, without detail, and it expands in such a way that it seems as if I'm outdoors, under an empty sky, or underground, in a cavern. I might be falling through space. I might be dreaming. I could be dead. Only the clock moves, its tick steady, unhurried. At these moments I have the most chilling understanding that time moves in only one direction.
ALAN BURDICK
"The Secret Life of Time", The New Yorker, December 19, 2016
A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.
CHARLES DARWIN
letter to his sister, Susan Elizabeth Darwin, August 4, 1836
Time changes the nature of the whole world;
Everything passes from one state to another
And nothing stays like itself.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
Time is the father of mutability.
SOLON
attributed, Day's Collacon
Time is the backdrop of our lives and the very fabric of the cosmos.
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life
People resemble still more the time in which they live, than they resemble their fathers.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
ROBERT FROST
"Acquainted with the Night"
Let every man be master of his time.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Macbeth
Time is a keyhole.... We sometimes bend and peer through it. And the wind we feel on our cheeks when we do--the wind that blows through the keyhole--is the breath of all the living universe.
STEPHEN KING
The Wind through the Keyhole
Remember that time slurs over everything, let all deeds fade, blurs all writings and kills all memories. Exempt are only those which dig into the hearts of men by love.
ARISTOTLE
letter to Alexander on the policy toward the Cities
Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
The end we know not; but we wander on,
Down the regretful wilderness of time.
HENRY ABBEY
"Emmanuel"
Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
We're sitting here and time is going on, and we know what it means to say that time is going on. I don't know what it means to say that time really doesn't pass and it's only in virtue of entropy increasing that it seems to.
TIM MAUDLIN
"A Defense of the Reality of Time", Quanta Magazine, May 16, 2017
Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion.
ECKHART TOLLE
The Power of Now
The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
O time! swift devourer of all created things!
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
My father Time is weak and gray
With waiting for a better day;
See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
The Mask of Anarchy
The universe may be timeless, but if you imagine breaking it into pieces, some of the pieces can serve as clocks for the others. Time emerges from timelessness. We perceive time because we are, by our very nature, one of those pieces.
CRAIG CALLENDER
Scientific American, June 2010