quotations about time
It's funny, don't you think, how time seems to do a lot of things? It flies, it tells, and worst of all, it runs out.
MARKUS ZUSAK
Fighting Ruben Wolfe
Time is a game played beautifully by children.
HERACLITUS
Fragments
The history of timepieces is a history of empires.
DEREK THOMPSON
"A Brief Economic History of Time", The Atlantic, December 21, 2016
Time ripens all things.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
ANNE CARSON
Autobiography of Red
Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanac
Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery, faithless, a pixy wife.
THOMAS MANN
The Beloved Returns
Time
Like a petal in the wind
Flows softly by
As old lives are taken
New ones begin
A continual chain
Which lasts throughout eternity
Every life but a minute in time
But each of equal importance
CINDY CHENEY
"Time"
I never follow the clock: hours were made for man, not man for hours.
FRANÇOIS RABELAIS
Gargantua
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Fellowship of the Ring
If you keep too busy to look at time you will not know that it is passing.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Time does you this perverse service of expansion when all you've got to fill it with is horror.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
We spend too much time cursing time--time waits for no man, time will tell, oh, the ravages of time, time flies! We don't think about the gift of time. Time gives us the chance to make mistakes and correct them, to regenerate, to grow. Time gives us the chance to forgive, to restore, to do better than we have ever done in the past. Time gives us the chance to be sorry when we fail and the chance to try to discover in ourselves a new heart.
ANNE RICE
The Wolves of Midwinter
The bell strikes One. We take no note of time
But from its loss. To give it then a tongue
Is wise in man. As if an angel spoke,
I feel the solemn sound. If heard aright,
It is the knell of my departed hours.
EDWARD YOUNG
Night Thoughts
I shall soar and sing o'er the wrecks of Time.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"The Maiden's Lament to Her False Lover"
There is a balance, a kind of standoff between the time continuum and the human entity, our frail bundle of soma and psyche. We eventually succumb to time, it's true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going. Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second.... We were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
CESARE PAVESE
"Morning Star over Calabria"
Well, we think that time "passes," flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
You can kill time in a number of ways but it always depends on the kind of time you're fighting: some time is unkillable, immortal.
MARTIN AMIS
Money