quotations about time
That time does not run backward, that is its wrath; "That which was"--that is the name of the stone it cannot roll.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Only time conquers time and its burdens.
DEAN KOONTZ
Brother Odd
Time is the best critic.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
If thou takest time into thy affairs, it will allay and arrange all things.
APOLLODORUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
Who shall contend with time--unvanquished time, the conqueror of conquerors, and lord of desolation?
HENRY KIRKE WHITE
"Time", The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White
Time is the supreme illusion. It is but the inner prism by which we decompose being and life, the mode under which we perceive successively what is simultaneous in idea.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
How quickly the time goes as the season advances, the earth hurtling along its groove into the years's sharply descending final arc.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
Time is the best avenger.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Life Is Too Short"
Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat--especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to August Derleth, November 21, 1930
O time, arrest your flight! and you, propitious hours, arrest your course! Let us savor the fleeting delights of our most beautiful days!
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"The Lake"
Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.
THOMAS WOLFE
Look Homeward, Angel
Time does not die; only people.
J. F. LAWTON
The Hunted
When we see an old tree dying
Slowly in the solemn wood,
To decay the proud strength yielding
That a century has stood,
We look on, and sadly wonder
At the mighty wreck of time,
As its potent finger traces
Sure destruction, line by line.
MARY T. LATHRAP
"We Shall Know Hereafter"
The chief beauty about the constant supply of time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoilt, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your career.
ARNOLD BENNETT
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
Our time is brief, and it will pass no matter what we do. So let us have purpose in spending it. Let us spend it so that our time matters to each of us, and matters to all those whose lives we touch.
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life
One hurries through, even though there's time; the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the glowing mouth in the side of the ship; the dim, turbulent alley is too confusedly the present.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Tender Is the Night
For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Paris Review, spring-summer 1965
Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides:
Who cover faults, at last shame them derides.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Lear
Time treads down empires.
DUGALD MOORE
"To the Moon"
Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"A New Refutation of Time", Other Inquisitions