quotations about time
Time is a keyhole.... We sometimes bend and peer through it. And the wind we feel on our cheeks when we do--the wind that blows through the keyhole--is the breath of all the living universe.
STEPHEN KING
The Wind through the Keyhole
Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don't stop at your station.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
We're sitting here and time is going on, and we know what it means to say that time is going on. I don't know what it means to say that time really doesn't pass and it's only in virtue of entropy increasing that it seems to.
TIM MAUDLIN
"A Defense of the Reality of Time", Quanta Magazine, May 16, 2017
Time is the backdrop of our lives and the very fabric of the cosmos.
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life
My father Time is weak and gray
With waiting for a better day;
See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
The Mask of Anarchy
Remember that time slurs over everything, let all deeds fade, blurs all writings and kills all memories. Exempt are only those which dig into the hearts of men by love.
ARISTOTLE
letter to Alexander on the policy toward the Cities
O aching time! O moments big as years!
JOHN KEATS
"Hyperion: A Fragment"
Time means less than the color of zero.
RAVEN GREGORY
Alice in Wonderland, issue #1, January 2012
One must work with time and not against it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Time, so complain'd of,
Who to no one man
Shows partiality,
Brings round to all men
Some undimm'd hours.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Consolation"
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
T. S. ELIOT
"Burnt Norton", Four Quartets
Time ... advances like the slowest tide, but retreats like the swiftest torrent.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
Time is the root of all this earth;
These creatures, who from Time had birth,
Within his bosom at the end
Shall sleep; Time hath nor enemy nor friend.
BHARTRHARI
"Time"
Anesthetized time; nothing moves and everything is at once.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
It rolls in grandeur lone--
The stream of Time;
And on its shores lie strown
The wrecks of every clime.
HARVEY RICE
"The Stream of Time"
Time is the longest distance between two places.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
The Glass Menagerie
Perhaps we expect time to work for us, when time is only given us that we may work.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Time is an impartial distributor.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
We do live and breathe,
And we are gone. The spoiler heeds us not.
We have our spring-time and our rottenness;
And as we fall, another race succeeds.
To perish likewise--Meanwhile Nature smiles--
The seasons run their round--The Sun fulfils
His annual course--and heaven and earth remain
Still changing, yet unchanged--still doom'd to feel
Endless mutation in perpetual rest.
Where are concealed the days which have elapsed?
Hid in the mighty cavern of THE PAST,
They rise upon us only to appal,
By indistinct and half-glimpsed images,
Misty, gigantic, huge, obscure, remote.
HENRY KIRKE WHITE
"Time", The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White