quotations about time
Time is a trust, and for every minute of it you will have to account.
JOHN LUBBOCK
The Use of Life
There was a time when time did not yet exist.
EMIL CIORAN
The Trouble with Being Born
Time is but the ante-chamber to eternity.
SUSANNAH MOODIE
Mark Hurdlestone; Or, The Two Brothers
No preacher is listened to but time; which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have tried in vain to put into our heads.
JONATHAN SWIFT
"Thoughts on Various Subjects", The Works of Jonathan Swift
I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
We are all burning in time, but each is consumed
at his own speed.
JACK GILBERT
"Burning (Andante Non Troppo)"
Ah! let us love, my Love, for Time is heartless,
Be happy while you may!
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"The Lake"
Well, ultimately nothing lasts. Everything is temporal, but some things last longer than others.
WALTER BARGEN
Riverfront Times, September 29, 2009
A proper disposition of time leaves a man at leisure in the very bustle of affairs; without delaying the attention of his concerns to the last or giving them unnecessary application at first: it affords a season for everything by affording everything its proper season.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
Days, months, years fly away, and irrecoverably sink in the abyss of time.
JEAN DE LA BRUYERE
attributed, Thoughts Moral and Divine
The years like birds of passage go
To that eternal clime, the past;
And May's immortal lot is cast
Upon their flight o'er all below,
Like sunlight on a field of snow,
Or some sweet rose-leaf on the blast.
HENRY ABBEY
"May Dreams"
How Time doth lash us with sharp pains,
Set loose our teeth, snatch wisps of hair, dim eyes --
And finally bend our backs toward earth
To find the fittest place for burial.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
"Of Time", Cloudrifts at Twilight
Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular -- an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Sexing the Cherry
Time's flying wheel leaves little trace behind.
ISAAC MCLELLAN
"Musings"
Time has laid his hand
Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it,
But as a harper lays his open palm
Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
The Golden Legend
While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
For though time may seem to drag slowly on
Before you will know it, time will be gone.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"The Voice of the Clock"
I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.
JULIAN BARNES
The Sense of an Ending
Time, among all concepts in the world of physics, puts up the greatest resistance to being dethroned from ideal continuum to the world of the discrete, of information, of bits.... Of all obstacles to a thoroughly penetrating account of existence, none looms up more dismayingly than 'time.' Explain time? Not without explaining existence. Explain existence? Not without explaining time. To uncover the deep and hidden connection between time and existence ... is a task for the future.
JOHN ARCHIBALD WHEELER
eulogy for Hermann Weyl, 1986
Time seemed wormholed and faulted, honeycombed in mazes that crossed and recrossed.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night