quotations about time
Time: the whisper beneath that word is death.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Time -- that black and narrow isthmus between two eternities.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers
The most difficult thing about Time, I have learned, is doing it.
ROGER ZELAZNY
The Guns of Avalon
What's that as flies without wings, your ladyship? Time! Time!
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Time overlaps itself. A breath breathed from a passing breeze is not the whole wind, neither is it just the last of what has passed and the first of what will come, but is more--let me see--more like a single point plucked on a single strand of a vast spider web of winds, setting the whole scene atingle. That way; it overlaps ... as prehistoric ferns grow from bathtub planters.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
Indifferent to the affairs of men, time runs out, precise, heedless, exact, and immutable in rhythm.
ERWIN SYLVANUS
Dr. Korczak and the Children
We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.
JOHN F. KENNEDY
Address to the National Association of Manufacturers in New York City, December 5, 1961
The past was a jigsaw puzzle and you never had all the pieces.
GREGORY BENFORD
Artifact
Time passed slowly, like and old man climbing a hill.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Lord of Light
A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
Time is but a phantom dagger
That motion lifts to slay itself.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
"Advice To a Pool"
When I was a child, I thought the pageant of the past was still intact and traveling in space at 186,282 miles per second, aboard a science-fiction beam of light under the command of Captain Clock. Not yet having learned how to count time as money, I know the beam of light is time shaped by the force of the human imagination and the powers of its expression (in the languages of art and science but not as the commodity discounted as an abstraction), and I'm content to live temporarily suspended in as many kinds and sorts of time (historical, biological, metaphysical, and mythological) as were my pagan forebears long since descended into the glossy darkness under the turf at Stonehenge.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Captain Clock", Lapham's Quarterly: Time
A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
The days are such a repetition of each other that they sometimes seem very long, but when one pauses and looks back one starts at the accumulation of departed time, and deplores the swiftness of the seasons.
ROBERT GRANT
"The Romance of a Soul"
Time is getting on.... Yes, bad luck to it. It always gallops when you want it to walk, and walks when you want it to gallop, like an ill-trained horse.
ROBERT BARR
The Victors
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 matters because we are finite, because time is the medium in which we live our lives.
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life
Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was -- only is.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Paris Review, spring 1956
Time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
Science and Human Values