quotations about time
Love and Time with reverence use,
Treat them like a parting friend:
Nor the golden gifts refuse
Which in youth sincere they send:
For each year their price is more,
And they less simple than before.
JOHN DRYDEN
Tyrannic Love
Anesthetized time; nothing moves and everything is at once.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
Time, so complain'd of,
Who to no one man
Shows partiality,
Brings round to all men
Some undimm'd hours.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Consolation"
My father Time is weak and gray
With waiting for a better day;
See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
The Mask of Anarchy
Time is a keyhole.... We sometimes bend and peer through it. And the wind we feel on our cheeks when we do--the wind that blows through the keyhole--is the breath of all the living universe.
STEPHEN KING
The Wind through the Keyhole
Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
interview, Words with Writers, December 5, 2011
O aching time! O moments big as years!
JOHN KEATS
"Hyperion: A Fragment"
Time is the backdrop of our lives and the very fabric of the cosmos.
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life
One must work with time and not against it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
It rolls in grandeur lone--
The stream of Time;
And on its shores lie strown
The wrecks of every clime.
HARVEY RICE
"The Stream of Time"
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives,
Who thinks most, feels noblest, acts the best
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Festus
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
T. S. ELIOT
"Burnt Norton", Four Quartets
Time ... advances like the slowest tide, but retreats like the swiftest torrent.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Time means less than the color of zero.
RAVEN GREGORY
Alice in Wonderland, issue #1, January 2012
Time is the longest distance between two places.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
The Glass Menagerie
Time is the root of all this earth;
These creatures, who from Time had birth,
Within his bosom at the end
Shall sleep; Time hath nor enemy nor friend.
BHARTRHARI
"Time"
The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Theses on the Philosophy of History
Remember that time slurs over everything, let all deeds fade, blurs all writings and kills all memories. Exempt are only those which dig into the hearts of men by love.
ARISTOTLE
letter to Alexander on the policy toward the Cities
Time is an impartial distributor.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims