quotations about time
Time's ruins build eternity's mansions.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
Time -- that black and narrow isthmus between two eternities.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers
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
So little time we live in Time,
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour's term
To practice for Eternity.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
"Bearded Oaks"
Only time conquers time and its burdens.
DEAN KOONTZ
Brother Odd
Time cleanses what it touches over time.
AESCHYLUS
Eumenides
Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides:
Who cover faults, at last shame them derides.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Lear
We are the fools of Time and Terror: Days
Steal on us, and steal from us; yet we live,
Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.
LORD BYRON
Manfred
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
Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain
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
One day you will hear the sound of time rustling as it slips through your fingers like sand.
SERGEI LUKYANENKO
Night Watch
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
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"
Time treads down empires.
DUGALD MOORE
"To the Moon"
Even such is time, that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
lines written the night before his death
I can never understand why I should eat at one or sleep at eleven, if it is, as it often is, my one and my eleven and nobody else's. For, as between the clock and me alone, one and eleven and all other o'clocks are mine and I am not theirs. But I have known men and women living in hotels who would interrupt a sunset to go to dine, or wave away the stars in their courses to go to sleep, merely because the hour had struck.
ZONA GALE
"Miggy"
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, 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
The end of time is the birthday of Eternity.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims