quotations about time
Man seems to be deficient in nothing so much as he is in time.
ZENO
attributed, Day's Collacon
Time loves a new lay; and the dirge he is playing
Will change for you soon to a livelier strain.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"You Will Forget Me"
Time is the school in which we learn.
Time is the fire in which we burn.
JOAN DIDION
The Year of Magical Thinking
When things don't please you, the best medicine is to swallow a little tincture of time.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
The fluid cradle of events (time).
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
Time matters because we are finite, because time is the medium in which we live our lives.
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life
The most difficult thing about Time, I have learned, is doing it.
ROGER ZELAZNY
The Guns of Avalon
Time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence -- neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish -- it is an imponderably valuable gift.
MAYA ANGELOU
Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now
Pick an apocalypse, any apocalypse. A sea of black oil and dead things. No wind. No light. Nothing stirring, not even an ant, a spider. A silent universe. Such is the end of the flicker of time, the brief, hot fuse of events and ideas set off, accidentally, and snuffed out, accidentally, by man. Not a real ending of course, nor even a beginning. Mere ripple in Time's stream.
JOHN GARDNER
Grendel
In what time does man live? The thinkers have always known that he does not live in any time at all. The immortality of thoughts and deeds banishes him to a timeless realm at whose heart an inscrutable death lies in wait.... Devoured by the countless demands of the moment, time slipped away from him; the medium in which the pure melody of his youth would swell was destroyed. The fulfilled tranquility in which his late maturity would ripen was stolen from him. It was purloined by everyday reality, which, with its events, chance occurrences, and obligations, disrupted the myriad opportunities of youthful time, immortal time.... From day to day, second to second, the self preserves itself, clinging to that instrument: time, the instrument that it was supposed to play.
WALTER BENJAMIN
"The Metaphysics of Youth", Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings
Time will discover everything to posterity; it is a babbler, and speaks even when no question is put.
EURIPIDES
attributed, Day's Collacon
We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.
JOHN F. KENNEDY
Address to the National Association of Manufacturers in New York City, December 5, 1961
Time is but a phantom dagger
That motion lifts to slay itself.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
"Advice To a Pool"
Time is but the ante-chamber to eternity.
SUSANNAH MOODIE
Mark Hurdlestone; Or, The Two Brothers
And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
MILAN KUNDERA
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Time is the chrysalis of eternity.
RICHTER
attributed, Day's Collacon
Time commences with mutable things; if they perish, it perishes with them.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
T. S. ELIOT
"The Dry Salvages", Four Quartets
Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was -- only is.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Paris Review, spring 1956