quotations about time
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
No preacher is listened to but time; which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have tried in vain to put into our heads.
JONATHAN SWIFT
"Thoughts on Various Subjects", The Works of Jonathan Swift
There was a time when time did not yet exist.
EMIL CIORAN
The Trouble with Being Born
Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury
I've always been keenly aware of the passing of time. I've always thought that I was old. Even when I was twelve, I thought it was awful to be thirty. I felt that something was lost. At the same time, I was aware of what I could gain, and certain periods of my life have taught me a great deal. But, in spite of everything, I've always been haunted by the passing of time and by the fact that death keeps closing in on us.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
interview, The Paris Review, spring-summer 1965
There is a desert of time as well as of land.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Time is but the ante-chamber to eternity.
SUSANNAH MOODIE
Mark Hurdlestone; Or, The Two Brothers
Previously, Newton considered time to be moving like a straight arrow which unerringly flies forward toward its target. Nothing could deflect or change the course of this arrow once it was shot. Einstein, however, showed that time was more like a mighty river, moving forward but often meandering through twisting valleys and plains. The presence of matter or energy might momentarily shift the direction of the river, but overall the river's course was smooth: It never abruptly ended or jerked backward. However, Gödel showed that the river of time could be smoothly bent backward into a circle. Rivers, after all, have eddy currents and whirlpools. In the main, a river may flow forward, but at the edges there are always side pools where water flows in a circular motion.
MICHIO KAKU
Hyperspace
The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.
HORACE
Epistles
Time will discover everything to posterity; it is a babbler, and speaks even when no question is put.
EURIPIDES
attributed, Day's Collacon
I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
Time goes, you say? ah no! Alas, time stays, we go.
GREGORY BENFORD
Furious Gulf
I think we are what Time may make us--lords
Of wealth and land, or wagemen held at hire;
Turning the years, we gain our toil's desire,
Or lose, inopportune, its high rewards.
KENNETH RAND
"To the Time-God"
Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion.
ECKHART TOLLE
The Power of Now
Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit at Rest
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 can also be a place.... Everything depends on where you are standing, on where you look or what you hear. The measure of it is found in consciousness itself.
FRANK HERBERT
God Emperor of Dune
Time has ghosts. That's what time is: the ghost of every instant passed, haunting the potential of every moment to come.
TIM LEBBON
Fears Unnamed
Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Time has laid his hand
Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it,
But as a harper lays his open palm
Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
The Golden Legend