quotations about time
Time cannot be spurred on like a horse.
KOBO ABE
The Woman in the Dunes
Time is a trust, and for every minute of it you will have to account.
JOHN LUBBOCK
The Use of Life
There is nothing fatherly about time and what it does to us, either.
DEAN KOONTZ
Forever Odd
Time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place, we advance, stop and retreat according to his orders, our mistake lies in imagining that we can catch him out.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
The Cave
Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular -- an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Sexing the Cherry
The fluid cradle of events (time).
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
The years like birds of passage go
To that eternal clime, the past;
And May's immortal lot is cast
Upon their flight o'er all below,
Like sunlight on a field of snow,
Or some sweet rose-leaf on the blast.
HENRY ABBEY
"May Dreams"
Time: the word tolled like the bells of a church.
JAMES BALDWIN
If Beale Street Could Talk
The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Conquest of Happiness
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.
STEVE JOBS
Commencement address at Stanford University, June 12, 2005
Time begets more than fiction can create.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Time, among all concepts in the world of physics, puts up the greatest resistance to being dethroned from ideal continuum to the world of the discrete, of information, of bits.... Of all obstacles to a thoroughly penetrating account of existence, none looms up more dismayingly than 'time.' Explain time? Not without explaining existence. Explain existence? Not without explaining time. To uncover the deep and hidden connection between time and existence ... is a task for the future.
JOHN ARCHIBALD WHEELER
eulogy for Hermann Weyl, 1986
When things don't please you, the best medicine is to swallow a little tincture of time.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Time seemed wormholed and faulted, honeycombed in mazes that crossed and recrossed.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night
Time is the chrysalis of eternity.
RICHTER
attributed, Day's Collacon
Time is only an illusion produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal duration, and it does not exist where no consciousness exists in which the illusion can be produced; but "lies asleep."
HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY
An Abridgement of the Secret Doctrine
Time has ghosts. That's what time is: the ghost of every instant passed, haunting the potential of every moment to come.
TIM LEBBON
Fears Unnamed
There was a time when time did not yet exist.
EMIL CIORAN
The Trouble with Being Born
Time as he grows old teaches all things.
AESCHYLUS
Prometheus Bound
Time is but the ante-chamber to eternity.
SUSANNAH MOODIE
Mark Hurdlestone; Or, The Two Brothers