quotations about time
Time depends on the position of the observer and the direction in which he looks.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
Time never works. It eats, and undermines, and rots, and rusts, and destroys. But it never works. It only gives us an opportunity to work.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Who shall contend with time--unvanquished time, the conqueror of conquerors, and lord of desolation?
HENRY KIRKE WHITE
"Time", The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White
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 is the best avenger.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Life Is Too Short"
Take care of the minutes, and the days will take care of themselves.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
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
Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides:
Who cover faults, at last shame them derides.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Lear
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"
Time does not die; only people.
J. F. LAWTON
The Hunted
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
Is Time outside me, I started wondering in high school. When things began to go fast. Or is Time inside me. If OUTSIDE you have to keep pace with f***ing clocks & calendars. No slacking off. If INSIDE, you do what you want. Whatever. You create your own Time. Like breaking the hands off a clock like I did once so it's just the clock face there looking at you.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Zombie
Time be thine,
And thy best graces spend it at thy will.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
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
Time, ghost-like, glides by us invisible, unseen, amid the glare and turmoil of the day; but in the gloom and silence of the midnight hour he stands revealed, and with one hand points mockingly to the wasted, marred past, and with the other towards the future; he whispers, in the lonely hour, into our ears the startling, fateful word, "Eternity."
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays, vol. II
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
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
Only time conquers time and its burdens.
DEAN KOONTZ
Brother Odd
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
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