quotations about time
All time exists. That is the truth.... If the future did not exist now, how could we journey toward it? If the past does not exist still, how could we leave it behind?
GENE WOLFE
The Claw of the Conciliator
Where's the man, where's the child
Wrapped together side by side.
Who can tell you what to do,
When Mr. Time has come for you.
See the truth, hear the lies,
Can there be no compromise
And who can tell you what they knew,
When Mr. Time has come for you.
THE ALAN PARSON PROJECT
"Mr. Time"
As the old saying goes, a man with one watch always knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never sure.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
The Organized Mind
Time is a kind of river, an irresistible flood sweeping up men and events and carrying them headlong, one after the other, to the great sea of being.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
"Time passes!" Men in fond delusion say.
"No!" Time demurs; "'tis men that pass away."
ARTHUR GUITERMAN
"Man and Time"
To spend time is to pass it in a specified manner. To waste time is to expend it thoughtlessly or carelessly. We all have time to spend or waste, and it is our decision what to do with it. But once passed, it is gone forever.
BRUCE LEE
Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living
Time speaks, and all is hush'd.
HENRY KIRKE WHITE
"Time", The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White
The cancer of time is eating us away.
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Cancer
Time is the vehicle that carries everything into nothing.
PAUL CHATFIELD
attributed, Day's Collacon
Oh how weak
Is mortal man! how trifling--how confined
His scope of vision! Puff'd with confidence,
His phrase grows big with immortality,
And he, poor insect of a summer's day!
Dreams of eternal honours to his name;
Of endless glory and perennial bays.
He idly reasons of eternity,
As of the train of ages--when, alas!
Ten thousand thousand of his centuries
Are, in comparison, a little point
Too trivial for recount.
HENRY KIRKE WHITE
"Time", The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White
Time has always been a vast ocean. Last week is more remote than Alpha Centauri.
ROBERT REED
interview, Lightspeed, March 2011
Without Time's swiftness, which is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Milton
Time's glory is to calm contending kings,
To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light,
To stamp the seal of time in aged things,
To wake the morn and sentinel the night,
To wrong the wronger till he render right,
To ruinate proud buildings with thy hours,
And smear with dust their glittering golden towers;
To fill with worm-holes stately monuments,
To feed oblivion with decay of things,
To blot old books and alter their contents,
To pluck the quills from ancient ravens' wings,
To dry the old oak's sap and cherish springs,
To spoil antiquities of hammer'd steel,
And turn the giddy round of Fortune's wheel;
To show the beldam daughters of her daughter,
To make the child a man, the man a child,
To slay the tiger that doth live by slaughter,
To tame the unicorn and lion wild,
To mock the subtle in themselves beguiled,
To cheer the ploughman with increaseful crops,
And waste huge stones with little water drops.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Rape of Lucrece
Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.
ANNE CARSON
Autobiography of Red
I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Idiot
It's time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
Blindness
What is a clock? Something agreed upon and arbitrarily imposed upon us. Standard time. Not true time. Symbolizing the whole standardization of our lives.
SUSAN GLASPELL
"Tickless Time"
Every step of the way we walk the line
Your days are numbered, so are mine
Time is pilin' up, we struggle and we scrape
We're all boxed in, nowhere to escape
BOB DYLAN
"Mississippi"
Time's chariot-wheels make their ruts in the fairest face.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Time will explain.
JANE AUSTEN
Persuasion