quotations about time
For more than two thousand years, the world's great minds have argued about the essence of time. Is it finite or infinite? Does it flow like a river or is it granular, proceeding in small bits, like sand trickling through an hourglass? And what is the present? Is now an indivisible instant, a line of vapor between the past and the future? Or is it an instant that can be measured--and, if so, how long is it? And what lies between the instants?
ALAN BURDICK
"The Secret Life of Time", The New Yorker, December 19, 2016
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
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 is the very lens through which ye see -- small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope -- something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality.
C. S. LEWIS
The Great Divorce
In the dark attics of our minds, all times mingle.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
Time does not die; only people.
J. F. LAWTON
The Hunted
Time is the best avenger.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Life Is Too Short"
Time never works. It eats, and undermines, and rots, and rusts, and destroys. But it never works. It only gives us an opportunity to work.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Is Time outside me, I started wondering in high school. When things began to go fast. Or is Time inside me. If OUTSIDE you have to keep pace with f***ing clocks & calendars. No slacking off. If INSIDE, you do what you want. Whatever. You create your own Time. Like breaking the hands off a clock like I did once so it's just the clock face there looking at you.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Zombie
Time perfects men as well as destroys them.
CHANAKYA
Vridda-Chanakya
Time, ghost-like, glides by us invisible, unseen, amid the glare and turmoil of the day; but in the gloom and silence of the midnight hour he stands revealed, and with one hand points mockingly to the wasted, marred past, and with the other towards the future; he whispers, in the lonely hour, into our ears the startling, fateful word, "Eternity."
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays, vol. II
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
Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?
SAMUEL BECKETT
Waiting for Godot
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
I don't suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You don't have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury
Make good use of Time ... reflect that yesterday cannot be recalled, tomorrow cannot be assured, today is only yours, which if you procrastinate you lose.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Time, that aged nurse.
JOHN KEATS
Endymion
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"
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"
He began to suspect another, deeper layer of time, a time of stone and cloud and tree to which the time of clocks and calendars was a gross mockery cobbled up by savages.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night