Time Quotes

Quotes About Time From Million Quotes

 

It is an old story, this irresistible and ceaseless onflow of life and time; time always scattering the flowers of life with a lavish hand along its course... - Hamilton Wright Mabie (1846–1916), "New Year's Eve" (c.1885), My Study Fire

I have seen a flower blooming in beauty in a secluded vale, and, ere I had a chance to look again, a chilly breath of air had scattered its petals and left it a ruin. - Charles Lanman, "Musings," 1840

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.
- Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012), "Nothing Twice," Calling Out to Yeti (1957), translated from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh

Clocks slay time... 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

Time is what prevents everything from happening at once. - John Archibald Wheeler

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. - Henry David Thoreau, "Economy," Walden, 1854

Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving. I'm not the station, I'm not the stop: I'm the train. I'm the train. - Martin Amis, Money: A Suicide Note, 1984

The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked. - Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle

Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them. - Dion Boucicault

In reality, killing time is only the name for another of the multifarious ways by which Time kills us. - Osbert Sitwell

Every day a thread makes a skein in the year. - Dutch Proverb

For disappearing acts, it's hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work. - Doug Larson

But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day. - Benjamin Disraeli

Time goes, you say? Ah no!
Alas, Time stays, we go.
- Henry Austin Dobson

Old Time, that greatest and longest established spinner of all!.... his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his hands are mutes. - Charles Dickens

Time wastes our bodies and our wits, but we waste time, so we are quits. - Author Unknown

Time is the fire in which we burn. - Delmore Schwartz, "Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day," 1937 (Thanks, George)

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
- William Shakespeare

You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by. - J.M. Barrie

A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours. - John B. Priestly

It strikes! one, two,
Three, four, five, six. Enough, enough, dear watch,
Thy pulse hath beat enough. Now sleep and rest;
Would thou could'st make the time to do so too;
I'll wind thee up no more.
- Ben Jonson

The flower that you hold in your hands was born today and already it is as old as you are. - Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

They played games, finishing in the greatest gale of delight with one invented by the Shaker girls, where the children were all named after days of the week, and were stolen by a beggar, one after another, while their mother was watching the porridge. - Amanda B. Harris, "Some Little Shakers," in Young People's New Pictorial Library of Poetry and Prose, 1888  [a little altered —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]

There is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike at, and who steals what is most precious to men: time. - Napoleon I, Maxims, 1815

Time gives good advice. (El tiempo da buen consejo.) - Spanish proverb

Old Time, in whose banks we deposit our notes
Is a miser who always wants guineas for groats;
He keeps all his customers still in arrears
By lending them minutes and charging them years.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

It's a strange thing, but when you are dreading something, and would give anything to slow down time, it has a disobliging habit of speeding up. - J.K. Rowling, "The Hungarian Horntail," Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 2000

Who forces time is pushed back by time; who yields to time finds time on his side. - The Talmud

Time is like the wind, it lifts the light and leaves the heavy. - Doménico Cieri Estrada

The years pass on in rapid flight
Time neither sleeps nor nods;
They come like frequent paragraphs,
All interspersed with quads...
- Sam Walter Foss (1858–1911), "New Year's. By a Printer" (Poems by Specialists), Back Country Poems, 1892

Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations. - Faith Baldwin

When told the reason for Daylight Saving time the old Indian said, "Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom of a blanket and have a longer blanket." - Author Unknown

When we remember that in the short space of one hundred years, all the inhabitants of this world will have passed into another state of existence, we cannot but acknowledge that the occupations of time engage too much of our attention.— All of us feel and know these things to be true, and yet we live as though we believed them not. Why is this? It is because the deep and dark valley of forgetfulness is the receptacle of neglected thought. It is a strange truth—we do forget! In the multiplicity of our earthly pursuits we forget that we are but pilgrims to another world. Reason tells the old man, that he was once young, but is he not prone to forget the high aspirations, the wild, free thoughts, the innocence and happiness of his early days? - Charles Lanman, "Musings," 1840

I hear the heartthrob of time in my veins. - Terri Guillemets

Time is making fools of us again. - J.K. Rowling

Why won't they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can't they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping — rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year's and Easter and Christmas — But, goodness, why need they do it? - John Dos Passos, 1917

How long a minute is, depends on which side of the bathroom door you're on. - Zall's Second Law

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. An odd moment in the afternoon. Today it is intolerable. - Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), Nausea, translated from the French by Lloyd Alexander  [La Nausée first published in 1938, first published in USA 1959. —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]

From that first moment of doubt, there was no peace for her; from the time she first imagined leaving her forest, she could not stand in one place without wanting to be somewhere else. She trotted up and down beside her pool, restless and unhappy. Unicorns are not meant to make choices. She said no, and yes, and no again, day and night, and for the first time she began to feel the minutes crawling over her like worms. - Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn, 1968

Round my cradle shimmered the last moonbeams of the eighteenth century and the first morning rays of the nineteenth. - Heinrich Heine (c.1799–1856), "Thoughts and Fancies," translated from German by John Snodgrass  [Many modern sources cite Heine's date of birth as Dec 13th 1797, in Düsseldorf, Germany. However, there are no existing documents to verify this, thus the date remains uncertain. Heine himself claimed his birthday was Dec 13th 1799, but other possible dates include Jan 1st 1800 and Dec 23rd 1797. —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]

The years like great black oxen tread the world
And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind.
- William Butler Yeats, The Countess Cathleen

Time! the corrector when our judgments err. - Lord Byron

The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not.... - Thomas Carlyle

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. - Carl Sandburg

Time isn't your master, you are. - Mike Dolan, @HawaiianLife

Time heals what reason cannot. - Seneca

I am tired of the imposed rhythms of men,
Tethered time, restrained and trained
To a monotonous beat
Digital time blinking exactness
Unliving.
- Phillip Pulfrey, "Conjecture," Beyond Me, www.originals.net

If you want work well done, select a busy man — the other kind has no time. - Elbert Hubbard

Dinner was soon followed by tea and coffee, a ten miles' drive home allowed no waste of hours, and from the time of their sitting down to table, it was a quick succession of busy nothings till the carriage came to the door... - Jane Austen (1775–1817), Mansfield Park (Volume I, Chapter X), 1814  [I've not seen the movie, but apparently the line has been updated to "Life seems nothing more than a quick succession of busy nothings." Austen was not the first to use the phrase "busy nothings" but of those who came before her, she is the most well-known. —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]

Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear? - Jack London

Time flies on restless pinions — constant never. - Friedrich Schiller

...Victor felt, in the thicket, as if he went through the gate of a new life, as on this fiery morning he sauntered onward with the sun, which darted beside him from twig to twig, through the murmuring wood, away along under symphonious branches, which were so many music-barrels set in motion, over moss that lay in green sun-fire, and under evergreen bathed in heavenly blue. And this morning renewed in his heart the painful likeness of four things,—life, a day, a year, a journey, which resemble each other in their fresh, exultant beginning, in the oppressive interlude, in the weary, sated close.— - Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Hesperus, or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography, translated from German by Charles T. Brooks, 1865

The Future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is. - C.S. Lewis

Time is a brisk wind, for each hour it brings something new... but who can understand and measure its sharp breath, its mystery and its design? - Paracelsus

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know. - Saint Augustine

Time is a very healing place, one in which you can grow. - Denise Tanner

Each moment has its sickle, emulous
Of Time's enormous scythe, whose ample sweep
Strikes empires from the root.
- Edward Young

The inertia hardest to overcome is that of perfectly good seconds. - Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)

Watches are so named as a reminder — if you don't watch carefully what you do with your time, it will slip away from you. - Drew Sirtors

...[M]ay its index point to joy,
And moments wing'd with new delights.
Sweet may resound each silver bell,—
And never quick returning chime,
Seem in reproving notes to tell,
Of hours mispent, and murder'd time....
- Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806), "The Horologe of the Fields" Addressed to a Young Lady, on seeing at the House of an Acquaintance a magnificent French Timepiece, published 1807

Time is the wisest counsellor of all. - Pericles

A lot like yesterday, a lot like never. - Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

There are whole years for which I hope I'll never be cross-examined, for I could not give an alibi. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

But it seemed to Lucy, in her waking womanhood, that there were other secrets hidden in Greymire; secrets that belonged to her alone, and would some day whisper their message to her heart. - Florence Bone (1875–1971), The Morning of To‑Day, 1907

The clocks are all turned forward from Funny Time to Right Time. I always remember, "Spring back or Fall in." - Dave Beard, @Raqhun)

Dark clouds,
bright sun—
fluffy life.
Mornings smell & taste
more like life;
Night reeks of dreams,
Afternoons are scentless,
save for tea & 3pm regret.
- Terri Guillemets

Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past even while we attempt to define it, and, like the flash of lightning, at once exists and expires. - Charles Caleb Colton

Time is the only thief we can't get justice against. - Terri Guillemets

Time is neither friend nor enemy it's just a measurement. - Mike Dolan, @HawaiianLife

Time is what we want most, but... what we use worst. - William Penn

Time is the longest distance between two places. - Tennessee Williams

Pick my left pocket of its silver dime, but spare the right — it holds my golden time! - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Man goes nowhere. Everything comes to man, like tomorrow. - Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Whether we wake or we sleep,
Whether we carol or weep,
The Sun with his Planets in chime,
Marketh the going of Time.
- Edward Fitzgerald

Time, the cradle of hope.... Wisdom walks before it, opportunity with it, and repentance behind it: he that has made it his friend will have little to fear from his enemies, but he that has made it his enemy will have little to hope from his friends. - Charles Caleb Colton

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. - Henry David Thoreau

The Present is a Point just passed. - David Russell

Methinks I see the wanton hours flee,
And as they pass, turn back and laugh at me.
- George Villiers

We cannot see time directly; we catch glimpses only of its reflections. - Terri Guillemets

Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can't buy more hours. Scientists can't invent new minutes. And you can't save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you've wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow. - Denis Waitely

Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away. - Charles Caleb Colton

One must learn a different... sense of time, one that depends more on small amounts than big ones. - Sister Mary Paul

Time is an old firmly rooted tree; we are the breeze rustling its leaves. - Terri Guillemets

Day, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent. - Ambrose Bierce

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. - Louis Hector Berlioz

Let not the sands of time get in your lunch. - Tony Hendra, "Deteriorata" (Thanks Tom)