quotations about time
For more than two thousand years, the world's great minds have argued about the essence of time. Is it finite or infinite? Does it flow like a river or is it granular, proceeding in small bits, like sand trickling through an hourglass? And what is the present? Is now an indivisible instant, a line of vapor between the past and the future? Or is it an instant that can be measured--and, if so, how long is it? And what lies between the instants?
ALAN BURDICK
"The Secret Life of Time", The New Yorker, December 19, 2016
Time is the best critic.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
Time is the very lens through which ye see -- small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope -- something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality.
C. S. LEWIS
The Great Divorce
Time does not die; only people.
J. F. LAWTON
The Hunted
Time is the best avenger.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Life Is Too Short"
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
Our time is brief, and it will pass no matter what we do. So let us have purpose in spending it. Let us spend it so that our time matters to each of us, and matters to all those whose lives we touch.
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life
That time does not run backward, that is its wrath; "That which was"--that is the name of the stone it cannot roll.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Time is the supreme illusion. It is but the inner prism by which we decompose being and life, the mode under which we perceive successively what is simultaneous in idea.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
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
When we see an old tree dying
Slowly in the solemn wood,
To decay the proud strength yielding
That a century has stood,
We look on, and sadly wonder
At the mighty wreck of time,
As its potent finger traces
Sure destruction, line by line.
MARY T. LATHRAP
"We Shall Know Hereafter"
Only time conquers time and its burdens.
DEAN KOONTZ
Brother Odd
Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.
THOMAS WOLFE
Look Homeward, Angel
O time, arrest your flight! and you, propitious hours, arrest your course! Let us savor the fleeting delights of our most beautiful days!
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"The Lake"
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
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
I don't suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You don't have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury
Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides:
Who cover faults, at last shame them derides.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Lear
For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Paris Review, spring-summer 1965
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