quotations about time
I've always been keenly aware of the passing of time. I've always thought that I was old. Even when I was twelve, I thought it was awful to be thirty. I felt that something was lost. At the same time, I was aware of what I could gain, and certain periods of my life have taught me a great deal. But, in spite of everything, I've always been haunted by the passing of time and by the fact that death keeps closing in on us.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
interview, The Paris Review, spring-summer 1965
We are all burning in time, but each is consumed
at his own speed.
JACK GILBERT
"Burning (Andante Non Troppo)"
Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit at Rest
Time, for a man who has never truly felt a second of it, is not a great sacrifice.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
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
Ye are but actors moved at Time's behest,
And king or slave as shifts the pantomime.
KENNETH RAND
"Sonnet"
But to say there was a time when time was not, is as absurd as to say there was a man when there was no man.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
Time seemed wormholed and faulted, honeycombed in mazes that crossed and recrossed.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Richard II
Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Troilus and Cressida
Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but it is noble to live life, and without time there is no life. Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
Time ... antiquates antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
Pseudodoxia Epidemica: Or Enquiries Into Very Many Received Tenents
How do you "spend" your time? Because make no mistake, time is a currency. There is a cost to how you spend it. The cost might be a trade-off, like choosing one activity over another, but don't fool yourself into thinking that this is a free exchange.
CARL RICHARDS
"Free Time? Not Likely, for Time Is Anything but Free", New York Times, January 18, 2017
Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away, but which nevertheless will make at the end of it, no small deduction from the life of man.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
There is nothing fatherly about time and what it does to us, either.
DEAN KOONTZ
Forever Odd
I think we are what Time may make us--lords
Of wealth and land, or wagemen held at hire;
Turning the years, we gain our toil's desire,
Or lose, inopportune, its high rewards.
KENNETH RAND
"To the Time-God"
As we speak cruel time is fleeing. Seize the day, believing as little as possible in tomorrow.
HORACE
Odes
Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me.
J. M. COETZEE
In the Heart of the Country