quotations about time
For time to pass means for events to be linearly ordered, by earlier and later. The causal structure of the world depends on its temporal structure. The present state of the universe produces the successive states. To understand the later states, you look at the earlier states and not the other way around. Of course, the later states can give you all kinds of information about the earlier states, and, from the later states and the laws of physics, you can infer the earlier states. But you normally wouldn't say that the later states explain the earlier states. The direction of causation is also the direction of explanation.
TIM MAUDLIN
"A Defense of the Reality of Time", Quanta Magazine, May 16, 2017
On the human imagination, events produce the effects of time. Thus, he who has travelled far and seen much, is apt to fancy that he has lived long; and the history that most abounds in important incidents, soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
The Deerslayer
Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?
SAMUEL BECKETT
Waiting for Godot
He began to suspect another, deeper layer of time, a time of stone and cloud and tree to which the time of clocks and calendars was a gross mockery cobbled up by savages.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night
Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Averroes' Search"
So much of what we now call time is a collective myth, devised by emperors, industrialists, protesters, and tinkerers.
DEREK THOMPSON
"A Brief Economic History of Time", The Atlantic, December 21, 2016
Men have contrived instruments to measure the motion of time, but they have no scales to weigh, no figures to compute, no words to describe its value.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
Time cleanses what it touches over time.
AESCHYLUS
Eumenides
Time, though in Eternity, applied
To motion, measures all things durable
By present, past, and future.
JOHN MILTON
Paradise Lost
One day you will hear the sound of time rustling as it slips through your fingers like sand.
SERGEI LUKYANENKO
Night Watch
There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.
VLADIMIR LENIN
attributed, The Great Book Of Best Quotes Of All Time
Time's ruins build eternity's mansions.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
Time be thine,
And thy best graces spend it at thy will.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
Time admits no argument.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain
Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases.
STEPHEN HAWKING
A Brief History of Time
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands,
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
T. S. ELIOT
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Time is endless and ours. Love and Death are only the games we play in it.
TANITH LEE
Delirium's Mistress
Time ripens the substance of a life as the seasons mellow and perfect its fruits. The best apples fall latest and keep longest.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
One who daily puts the finishing touches on his life is never in want of time.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales