quotations about time
At nineteen, it seems to me, one has a right to be arrogant; time has usually not begun its stealthy and rotten subtractions. It takes away your hair and your jump-shot, according to a popular country song, but in truth it takes away a lot more than that.
STEPHEN KING
introduction, The Gunslinger
Time, place and space are illusions, having no existence save in the mind of man which must set limits and bounds in order to understand.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
Kull: Exile of Atlantis
Time: the word tolled like the bells of a church.
JAMES BALDWIN
If Beale Street Could Talk
And now, Lord, these things are passed by, and time hath assuaged my wound.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
E'en Beauty mourns in her decaying bower,
That Time upon her angel brow should set
His crooked autograph, and mar the jet
Of glossy locks. Lo! how her chaplet green,
The hoar frost and the canker worm destroy.
Decay's dull film obscures those matchless eyes.
ISAAC MCLELLAN
"Musings"
O time! swift devourer of all created things!
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
People resemble still more the time in which they live, than they resemble their fathers.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Fellowship of the Ring
Those who understand the value of time use it as prudent people do their money--they make a little go a great way.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Time changes the nature of the whole world;
Everything passes from one state to another
And nothing stays like itself.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.
CHARLES DARWIN
letter to his sister, Susan Elizabeth Darwin, August 4, 1836
Time gives his hour-glass
Its due reversal.
Their hour is gone.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Consolation"
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
They that drive away time spur a free horse.
JOHN MASON
Select Sentences
Time is short. Seventy years in the eye of youthful fancy seems a vast and almost boundless space; but in the estimate of sage experience, and in the full view of eternity, they contract to a span and dwindle to a point.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
Nothing is more precious than time, and those who misspend it are the greatest of all prodigals.
THEOPHRASTUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
A thousand pleasant arts we'll have
To add new feathers to the wings of Time,
And make him smoothly haste away:
We'll use him as our slave,
And when we please we'll bid him stay,
And clip his wings, and make him stop to view
Our studies, and our follies too.
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
"To Mr. Barbauld"
Ye are but actors moved at Time's behest,
And king or slave as shifts the pantomime.
KENNETH RAND
"Sonnet"
The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
Some nights--more than I like, lately--I wake to the sound of the bedside clock. The room is dark, without detail, and it expands in such a way that it seems as if I'm outdoors, under an empty sky, or underground, in a cavern. I might be falling through space. I might be dreaming. I could be dead. Only the clock moves, its tick steady, unhurried. At these moments I have the most chilling understanding that time moves in only one direction.
ALAN BURDICK
"The Secret Life of Time", The New Yorker, December 19, 2016