quotations about time
The bell strikes One. We take no note of time
But from its loss. To give it then a tongue
Is wise in man. As if an angel spoke,
I feel the solemn sound. If heard aright,
It is the knell of my departed hours.
EDWARD YOUNG
Night Thoughts
Still Time, great wizard of this earth,
Who holds o'er human minds such sway!
Oft bids to scenes of later birth
Old recollections to give way.
ANNE S. BUSHBY
"Florinda"
Well, we think that time "passes," flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
I shall soar and sing o'er the wrecks of Time.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"The Maiden's Lament to Her False Lover"
The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
CESARE PAVESE
"Morning Star over Calabria"
We grasp at Time, but cannot hold
One minute of his treasured hour;
He tarries not, though oft we pray
That he will rest in youth's bright bower.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Time's Ravages"
The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have.
ROLLO MAY
Man's Search for Himself
Time sure kicks the shit out of people.
DAN SIMMONS
Lovedeath
Time is a measure of space, just as a range-finder is a measure of space, but measuring locks us into the place we measure.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
In the dark attics of our minds, all times mingle.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
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
Time is their tyrant: it fails them, it escapes them; they can neither expand it nor cut it short.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Take care of the minutes, and the days will take care of themselves.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
How rapidly time urges his flight; sometimes as a relentless, unsparing destroyer; but oftener as a swift-winged and beautiful angel; changing, yet not taking away this world's blessings: making our past sorrows look dim in the distance; opening many flowers of pleasure on our way, and gradually ripening our souls for the great eternity.
WILLIAM CHAMBERS
The Herald of Gospel Liberty, September 22, 1921
How unthinking must those unhappy persons be, who make it a common excuse for idle and pernicious amusements, that they do it to kill Time.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
There is a balance, a kind of standoff between the time continuum and the human entity, our frail bundle of soma and psyche. We eventually succumb to time, it's true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going. Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second.... We were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
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 depends on the position of the observer and the direction in which he looks.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
Only time conquers time and its burdens.
DEAN KOONTZ
Brother Odd
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