quotations about time
Oh, thou divinest healer Time
And thing sublime!
That thou should'st gladly life's lorn nest
Anew invest,
And set before the eyes of man
A deeper purpose, holier plan,
And gently bridge the abysmal span,
'Twixt earth and rest!
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"Oh, Thou Inexorable Grief"
Pass on, ever on, O Time! ush'ring in
New joys, new aspirations, and new life.
WATIE W. SWANZY
"Time"
All substances the cunning chemist Time
Melts down into that liquor of my life.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Day's Ration
Men have contrived instruments to measure the motion of time, but they have no scales to weigh, no figures to compute, no words to describe its value.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
The ancients painted time in the form of an old man with a large tuft of hair on his forehead, but bald behind, to teach us, that, if we catch him not as he comes, it will be impossible after he has passed by.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
Time, that aged nurse.
JOHN KEATS
Endymion
Sometimes I'll look down at my watch 3 consecutive times and still not know what time it is.
MACKEY MILLER
Mouse Attack 5!!!
Time cleanses what it touches over time.
AESCHYLUS
Eumenides
Time admits no argument.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Time is endless and ours. Love and Death are only the games we play in it.
TANITH LEE
Delirium's Mistress
Time -- that black and narrow isthmus between two eternities.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands,
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
T. S. ELIOT
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Time's ruins build eternity's mansions.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
On the human imagination, events produce the effects of time. Thus, he who has travelled far and seen much, is apt to fancy that he has lived long; and the history that most abounds in important incidents, soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
The Deerslayer
Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Averroes' Search"
Time, though in Eternity, applied
To motion, measures all things durable
By present, past, and future.
JOHN MILTON
Paradise Lost
One who daily puts the finishing touches on his life is never in want of time.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
Time: the whisper beneath that word is death.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
For time to pass means for events to be linearly ordered, by earlier and later. The causal structure of the world depends on its temporal structure. The present state of the universe produces the successive states. To understand the later states, you look at the earlier states and not the other way around. Of course, the later states can give you all kinds of information about the earlier states, and, from the later states and the laws of physics, you can infer the earlier states. But you normally wouldn't say that the later states explain the earlier states. The direction of causation is also the direction of explanation.
TIM MAUDLIN
"A Defense of the Reality of Time", Quanta Magazine, May 16, 2017
Time is a lake, getting deeper year by year, drop by drop. Surface tension, the electric presence of our staccato acts, keeps us scuttling like water bugs on its surface, unmindful of the depths we traverse. We're safe, afloat in the now, until we stop moving and begin to sink into the past. Only then do we realize how important all those yesterdays were, how they hold each present moment to the sun; and how many people we leave behind, stricken in time like ambered insects.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
Blood of Angels