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Time

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Time is a concept referring to the perceived flow of actions and events from the past to future, or to its measurement. In physics it is also referred to as "the fourth dimension" of a space-time continuum.


CONTENTS
Alphabetized by author or source
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z
Bible
The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904)
Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)
Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989)
See also · External links

A

[edit]
Time brings all things to pass. ~ Aeschylus
Time makes me stronger
Well, there's nothing more to say. ~ Anastacia
Time is not composed of indivisible nows any more than any other magnitude is composed of indivisibles. ~ Aristotle
Remember that time slurs over everything, let all deeds fade, blurs all writings and kills all memories. Except are only those which dig into the hearts of men by love. ~ Aristotle
O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time. ~ W. H. Auden
  • Ἀλλ' ἐκδιδάσκει πάνθ' ὁ γηράσκων χρόνος.
    • Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, line 981
    • Time waxing old can many a lesson teach.
    • line 981 (tr. E. H. Plumptre).
    • Variant translations:
      • Time brings all things to pass.
      • Time as he grows old teaches all things.
  • Love for the endlessness of labor is in itself an initiation of considerable degree; it prepares you for the conquest of time. Being in a condition where you have conquered time guarantees you a place in the Subtle World, where work is an unavoidable condition, just as it is in the body. A complaint about having to work can only come from a slave of the body.
  • The sword of time will pierce our skins
    It doesn't hurt when it begins
    But as it works its way on in
    The pain grows stronger watch it grin.
    Suicide is painless
    It brings on many changes
    And I can take or leave them if I please.
  • All things must in equity again decline into that whence they have their origin for they must give satisfaction and atonement for injustice each in the order of time.
  • Time went on, relentlessly, and one by one the proud works of man were lost.
    • Poul Anderson, The Long Way Home (1978 Ace Books restored edition), Chapter 6
  • Remember that time slurs over everything, let all deeds fade, blurs all writings and kills all memories. Except are only those which dig into the hearts of men by love.
    • Aristotle, Free Translation from the French version of a letter named "The Letter of Aristotle to Alexander on the Policy toward the Cities". Basis for translation: Lettre d’Aristote à Alexandre sur la politique envers les cités, Arabic text edition and translated/edited by Józef Bielawski and Marian Plezia (Warsaw: Polish Academy of Sciences, 1970), page 72
  • That time either has no being at all, or is only scarcely and faintly, one might suspect from this: part of it has happened and is not, while the other part is going to be but is not yet, and it is out of these that the infinite, or any given, time is composed. But it would seem impossible for a thing composed of non-beings to have any share in being.
  • Aristotle, Physics, as translated by Joe Sachs (Rutgers University Press: 2011), 217b30
  • Time is not composed of indivisible nows any more than any other magnitude is composed of indivisibles.
  • Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.
  • O let not Time deceive you,
    You cannot conquer Time.
  • But if any excursive brain rove over the images of forepassed times, and wonder that Thou the God Almighty and All-creating and All-supporting, Maker of heaven and earth, didst for innumerable ages forbear from so great a work, before Thou Wouldest make it; let him awake and consider, that he wonders at false conceits. For whence could innumerable ages pass by, which Thou madest not, Thou the Author and Creator of all ages? or what times should there be, which were not made by Thee? or how should they pass by, if they never were? Seeing then Thou art the Creator of all times, if any time was before Thou madest heaven and earth, why say they that Thou didst forego working? For that very time didst Thou make, nor could times pass by, before Thou madest those times. But if before heaven and earth there was no time, why is it demanded, what Thou then didst? For there was no "then," when there was no time.
  • God, the supreme being, is neither circumscribed by space, nor touched by time; he cannot be found in a particular direction, and his essence cannot change. The secret conversation is thus entirely spiritual; it is a direct encounter between God and the soul, abstracted from all material constraints.
    • Avicenna, as quoted in 366 Readings From Islam (2000), ed., Robert Van der Weyer.

B

[edit]
There is no such thing as time on the inner planes, as humanity understands it. There are only cycles of activity or of non-activity. ~ Alice A. Bailey
You insert your existence advantageously into time. Each of your moments becomes useful. With each moment, the possibility is given you to advance to some chosen goal, and your time becomes a march toward that goal—what’s normally called living. ~ Georges Bataille
Once you realize you deserve a bright future, letting go of your dark past is the best choice you will ever make. ~ Roy T. Bennett
Eternity is in love with the productions of time. ~ William Blake
Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Time's swiftness Which is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment. ~ William Blake
I see the Past, Present & Future, existing all at once ~ William Blake
Those who adhere to the past won't be able to cope with the future. ~ Willy Brandt
Nothing we do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future. ~ Ashleigh Brilliant
Time is the most precious gift in our possession, for it is the most irrevocable. … Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Don't waste your time, or time will waste you. ~ Muse (band)
Time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different. ~ Jorge Luis Borges
Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time. ~ Jorge Luis Borges
This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. ~ Jorge Luis Borges
Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. ~ Jorge Luis Borges
You shouldn't chase after the past or place expectations on the future. What is past is left behind. The future is as yet unreached. Whatever quality is present you clearly see right there, right there. ~ Buddha
You can never plan the future by the past. ~ Edmund Burke
Yet Time, who changes all, had altered him
In soul and aspect as in age; years steal
Fire from the mind as vigour from the limb;
And life's enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim. ~ Lord Byron
  • With regard to authority, it is the greatest weakness to attribute infinite credit to particular authors, and to refuse his own prerogative to time, the author of all authors, and, therefore, of all authority. For truth is rightly named the daughter of time not of authority. It is not wonderful, therefore, if the bonds of antiquity, authority, and unanimity have so enchained the power of man, that he is unable (as if bewitched) to become familiar with things themselves.
  • And he that will not apply New Remedies, must expect New Evils: for Time is the greatest Innovateur...
  • The spiritual man is not conscious of time, once he is separated from the physical body. Time is the sequential registration by the brain of states of awareness, and of progressive contacts with phenomena. There is no such thing as time on the inner planes, as humanity understands it. There are only cycles of activity or of non-activity.
  • [T]he Quantity of motive Force cannot be known without Time... Time (...abstractedly) is the continuance of any Thing in its own Being. ...Time absolutely... is Quantity, as admitting... Equality, Inequality, and Proportion... [Y]ou may ask, whether Time was not before the World was created? And if Time does not flow in the Extramundane Space, where nothing is: A mere Vacuum? ..[S]ince there was Space before the World was created, and... there now is an Extramundane, infinite Space, (where God is present)... Time existed before the World began... Some Sun might have given Light long before; and at present this, or some other like it, may diffuse Light thro' Imaginary Spaces. Time therefore does not imply an actual Existence, but only the Capacity or Possibility of the Continuance of Existence; just as Space expresses the Capacity of a Magnitude contain'd in it. ...[D]oes not Time imply Motion? I answer no... any more than it does Rest. ...[W]hether Things move on, or stand still; whether we sleep or wake, Time flows perpetually with an equal Tenor.
  • Time is... a Quantum in itself, tho' in Order to find the Quantity of it, we... call in Motion... as a Measure... and thus Time as measurable signifies Motion; for if all Things were to continue at Rest, it would be impossible to find out... how much Time has elaps'd... We perceive nothing, unless so far as we may be instigated by some Change affecting the Senses, or that our Souls are mov'd and excited by the internal Operation of the Mind. ...So that the Quantity of Time so far as we can observe; depends upon the Extension of Motion. ...It cannot be justly inferr'd... We do not perceive the Thing, therefore there is no such Thing, that is a false Illusion, a deceitful Dream, that wou'd cause us to join together two remote Instants of Time. But nevertheless this is very True... That is, for as much Motion as there was, so much Time seems to have been elapsed; nor, when we mention such a Quantity of Time, do we merely mean any Thing else, than the Performance of so much Motion, to the continued successive Extension of which we imagine the Permanency as Things is co-extended.
  • I cannot exist entirely except when somehow I go beyond the stage of action. Otherwise I’m a soldier, a professional, a man of learning, not a “total human being.” The fragmentary state of humanity is basically the same as the choice of an object. When you limit your desires to possessing political power, for instance, you act and know what you have to do. … You insert your existence advantageously into time. Each of your moments becomes useful. With each moment, the possibility is given you to advance to some chosen goal, and your time becomes a march toward that goal—what’s normally called living. … Every action makes you a fragmentary existence. I hold on to my nature as an entirety only by refusing to act—or at least by denying the superiority of time, which is reserved for action.
  • In what time does man live? The thinkers have always known that he does not live in any time at all. The immortality of thoughts and deeds banishes him to a timeless realm at whose heart an inscrutable death lies in wait. ... Devoured by the countless demands of the moment, time slipped away from him; the medium in which the pure melody of his youth would swell was destroyed. The fulfilled tranquility in which his late maturity would ripen was stolen from him. It was purloined by everyday reality, which, with its events, chance occurrences, and obligations, disrupted the myriad opportunities of youthful time, immortal time. ... From day to day, second to second, the self preserves itself, clinging to that instrument: time, the instrument that it was supposed to play.
    • Walter Benjamin, "The Metaphysics of Youth," in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (1996), pp. 10-11
  • Once you realize you deserve a bright future, letting go of your dark past is the best choice you will ever make.
  • YEAR, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.
  • I see the Four-fold Man.
    The Humanity in deadly sleep,
    And its fallen Emanation. The Spectre & its cruel Shadow.
    I see the Past, Present & Future, existing all at once
    Before me; O Divine Spirit sustain me on thy wings!
    • William Blake, Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion (c. 1803–1820) Ch. 1, plate 15, lines 6-9
  • Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
    • William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "Proverbs of Hell"
  • Time is the most precious gift in our possession, for it is the most irrevocable. This is what makes it so disturbing to look back upon the time which we have lost. Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering. Time lost is time not filled, time left empty.
    • Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as quoted in LIFE magazine (22 April 1957), p. 152; also in Letters and Papers from Prison (1967), p. 47
  • Time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.
    • Jorge Luis Borges, "Juan Muraña", in Brodie's Report (1970); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
  • Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
  • The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts'ui Pên conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us.
    • Variant translation: This web of time — the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries — embrace every possibility.
    • Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths (1958) as translated by Donald A. Yates
  • Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.
    • Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths (1958) as translated by Donald A. Yates
  • And yet, and yet … Negar la sucesión temporal, negar el yo, negar el universo astronómico, son desesperaciones aparentes y consuelos secretos. Nuestro destino no es espantoso por irreal: es espantoso porque es irreversible y de hierro. El tiempo es la sustancia de que estoy hecho. El tiempo es un río que me arrebata, pero yo soy el río; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego. El mundo desgraciadamente es real; yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges.
    • And yet, and yet . . . Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.
    • "A New Refutation of Time" (1946) ["Nueva refutación del tiempo"]
    • Variant translations:
      • And yet, and yet... Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are obvious acts of desperation and secret consolation. Our fate (unlike the hell of Swedenborg or the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful because it is unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironclad. Time is the thing I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.
      • Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
    • Jorge Luis Borges, Otras inquisiciones (1952); first translated by Ruth L. C. Simms as Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952 (1964)
  • we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
  • Die Zukunft wird nicht gemeistert von denen, die am Vergangenen kleben.
    • Those who adhere to the past won't be able to cope with the future.
    • Willy Brandt, speech at the extraordinary convention of the Social Democratic Party of Germany on 18 November 1971, book source: "Reden und Interviews: Herbst 1971 bis Frühjahr 1973", Hoffmann und Campe, 1973, p. 25.
  • Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we've lived. After all Number One, we're only mortal.
  • Time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's.
  • You shouldn't chase after the past or place expectations on the future. What is past is left behind. The future is as yet unreached. Whatever quality is present you clearly see right there, right there.
    • Gautama Buddha, Bhaddekaratta Sutta: An Auspicious Day, MN 131, (1997) translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
  • If there is one thing that I have come to hate more than the gods, it is time.
  • You can never plan the future by the past.
    • Edmund Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), Volume IV, p. 55.
  • Yet Time, who changes all, had altered him
    In soul and aspect as in age; years steal
    Fire from the mind as vigour from the limb;
    And life's enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim.
  • O Time! the beautifier of the dead,
    Adorner of the ruin, comforter
    And only healer when the heart hath bled—
    Time! the corrector where our judgments err,
    The test of truth, love, sole philosopher,
    For all besides are sophists, from thy thrift
    Which never loses though it doth defer—
    Time, the avenger! unto thee I lift
    My hands, and eyes, and heart, and crave of thee a gift.

C

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How we remember the past determines the shape of the future. ~ James Carroll
Shall we, whose atom of time is but a fragment out of an ever-present eternity — shall we, so long as we live, or even at our life's ending, dare to cry out to the Eternal One, "It is too late!" ~ Dinah Craik
Time ripens all things. No man is born wise. ~ Miguel de Cervantes
There is a time for some things, and a time for all things; a time for great things, and a time for small things. ~ Miguel de Cervantes
With the magnificence of eternity before us, let time, with all its fluctuations, dwindle into its own littleness. ~ Thomas Chalmers
If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future. ~ Winston Churchill
We redeem time, and do not merely use it. We transform it into eternity by living it aright. ~ James Freeman Clarke
  • Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony, — and, therefore, why shouldn't I have changed a trifle?
  • The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules.
  • Waiting for the time to pass you by; hope the winds of change will change your mind.
  • 'I could tell you my adventures — beginning from this morning,' said Alice a little timidly: 'but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.'
    'Explain all that,' said the Mock Turtle.
    'No, no! The adventures first,' said the Gryphon in an impatient tone: 'explanations take such a dreadful time.'
  • It's always tea time!
  • Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. There's a wonderful formula that the Buddhists have for the Bodhisattva, the one whose being (sattva) is illumination (bodhi), who realizes his identity with eternity and at the same time his participation in time. And the attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder and to come back and participate in it.
  • The Present Time, youngest-born of Eternity, child and heir of all the Past Times with their good and evil, and parent of all the Future, is ever a "New Era" to the thinking man; and comes with new questions and significance, however commonplace it look: to know it, and what it bids us do, is ever the sum of knowledge for all of us. This new Day, sent us out of Heaven, this also has its heavenly omens;—amid the bustling trivialities and loud empty noises, its silent monitions, which if we cannot read and obey, it will not be well with us!
    • Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets, The Present Time 1850
  • "The time has come", the Walrus said,
    "To talk of many things:
    Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
    Of cabbages—and kings—
    And why the sea is boiling hot—
    And whether pigs have wings".
    • Lewis Carroll, "The Walrus and the Carpenter", stanza 11, Through the Looking-Glass, chapter 4. Logical Nonsense: The Works of Lewis Carroll, ed. Philip C. Blackburn and Lionel White, p. 188 (1934). First published in 1871. Reported in United States Library of Congress, Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
  • Given time-time not in years but in millennia-life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time.
  • A butterfly
    Fluttering over the vendor's
    Dry flowers of spring
    Only two days it flies
    Caught by the lost boy
    Yet still.
    • Shane Castro, For Peng Fajardo, in The Now
  • Time ripens all things. No man is born wise.
  • With the magnificence of eternity before us, let time, with all its fluctuations, dwindle into its own littleness.
    • Thomas Chalmers, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 584
  • The more thorough the understanding needed, the further back in time one must go.
    • Gordon Clark, A Christian View of Men and Things (1951), p. 58.
  • In the spirit of faith let us begin each day, and we shall be sure to " redeem the time " which it brings to us, by changing it into something definite and eternal. There is a deep meaning in this phrase of the apostle, to redeem time. We redeem time, and do not merely use it. We transform it into eternity by living it aright.
    • James Freeman Clarke, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 583
  • Time,— that black and narrow isthmus between two eternities.
    • Charles Caleb Colton, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 582
  • The opera ain't over till the fat lady sings.
    • Dan Cook, sports broadcaster and writer for the San Antonio (Texas) Express-News, on television newscast in April 1978, after the first basketball playoff game between the San Antonio Spurs and the Washington Bullets, to illustrate that while the Spurs had won once, the series was not over yet. Bullets coach Dick Motta borrowed the phrase later during the Bullets' eventually successful championship drive, and it became widely known and was often mistakenly attributed to him. The Washington Post (June 11, 1978), p. D6. Cook may well have said isn't, but this remark is generally heard with ain't. Reported in United States Library of Congress, Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
  • The Big Business Man smiled. “Time,” he said, “is what keeps everything from happening at once."
    • Ray Cummings, The Girl in the Golden Atom, All-Story Weekly. (March 1919)
  • I do know what time is,” Tubby declared. He paused. “Time,” he added slowly—“time is what keeps everything from happening at once. I know that—I seen it in print, too.”
    • Ray Cummings, The Time Professor, Argosy All-Story Weekly, (1921)
  • What though the tide of years may roll.
    • Edward A. Craighill, "God Old Song", first line of second stanza, 1895. This song from the University of Virginia is set to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne". John S. Patton, Sallie J. Doswell, and Lewis D. Crenshaw, Jefferson's University (1915), p. 72–73. Reported in United States Library of Congress, Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
  • "I am but as others: I am but what I was born to be."
    "Do you recognize what you were born to be? Not only a nobleman, but a gentleman; not only a gentleman, but a man — man, made in the image of God. How can you, how dare you, give the lie to your Creator?"
    "What has He given me? What have I to thank Him for?"
    "First, manhood; the manhood His Son disdained not to wear; worldly gifts, such as rank, riches, influence, things which others have to spend half an existence in earning; life in its best prime, with much of youth yet remaining — with grief endured, wisdom learnt, experience won. Would to Heaven, that by any poor word of mine I could make you feel all that you are — all that you might be!"
    A gleam, bright as a boy's hope, wild as a boy's daring, flashed from those listless eyes — then faded.
    "You mean, Mr. Halifax, what I might have been. Now it is too late."
    "There is no such word as 'too late,' in the wide world — nay, not in the universe. What! shall we, whose atom of time is but a fragment out of an ever-present eternity — shall we, so long as we live, or even at our life's ending, dare to cry out to the Eternal One, 'It is too late!'"
    • Dinah Craik, John Halifax, Gentleman (1857), Chapter 36
  • ... on the confines of this world, or from the unknown shores of the next, the question meets them: "What have you done with Time?" —Time, the only mortal gift bestowed equally on every living soul, and, excepting the soul, the only mortal loss which is totally irretrievable.
  • Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.

D

[edit]
The wisest are the most annoyed at the loss of time. ~ Dante Alighieri
Time is fleeting. See what it brings. ~ Depeche Mode
Time goes, you say? Ah no, alas, time stays, we go. ~ Henry Austin Dobson
If we consider eternity, into that time never entered; eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is as a short parenthesis in a long period; and eternity had been the same as it is, though time had never been. ~ John Donne
Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own;
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today. ~ John Dryden
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past...
For the times they are a-changin’. ~ Bob Dylan
  • Truth was the only daughter of Time.
    • Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations., as translated by Edward MacCurdy.
  • He is changing times and seasons, removing kings and setting up kings.
  • Rose: I can see everything. All that is, all that was, all that ever could be.
Doctor: That's what I see. All the time. And doesn't it drive you mad?
  • The whole time of my life may be divided into an infinity of parts, each of which is in no way dependent on any other; and, accordingly, because I was in existence a short time ago, it does not follow that I must now exist, unless in this moment some cause create me anew as it were,—that is, conserve me.
  • If we consider eternity, into that time never entered; eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is as a short parenthesis in a long period; and eternity had been the same as it is, though time had never been.
    • John Donne, Book of Devotions, Meditation 14 (1624)
  • Time Prophet: Time begins and then time ends,
    and then time begins once again
    It is happening now, it has happened before,
    it will surely happen again.
Kai: Prophet, I have come to you,
here on this uncertain moon,
Do we Brunnen-G, have any hope,
or are my people doomed?
Time Prophet: I looked into the cycles of time,
not very clearly mind you
I gaze into, future past,
and I see the Brunnen-G doomed
For Kai you'll be the last to die,
and there is something else I see
the Shadows Order will be destroyed,
at the hands of the last Brunnen-G .
Kai: Are you certain Time Prophet?
Time Prophet: Time begins, and then time ends,
and then time begins once again
It is happening now, it has happened before,
it will surely happen again.
  • Lexx, Brigadoom (April 9, 1999), written by Paul Donovan & Lex Gigeroff.
  • The line it is drawn
    The curse it is cast
    The slow one now
    Will later be fast
    As the present now
    Will later be past
    The order is rapidly fadin’
    And the first one now will later be last
    For the times they are a-changin’.

E

[edit]
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
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. ~ T. S. Eliot
Time the destroyer is time the preserver. ~ T. S. Eliot
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you. ~ T. S. Eliot
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment ...
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered. ~ T. S. Eliot
  • Every reference-body (co-ordinate system) has its own particular time; unless we are told the reference-body to which the statement of time refers, there is no meaning in a statement of the time of an event.
  • If you don't take my words too seriously, I would say this: If we assume that all matter would disappear from the world, then, before relativity, one believed that space and time would continue existing in an empty world. But, according to the theory of relativity, if matter and its motion disappeared there would no longer be any space or time.
    • Albert Einstein (1921) as quoted by Philipp Frank, Einstein, His Life and Times (1947) 1st edition, Ch. VIII, Sect. 5, p. 178. In response to the question by an American journalist: How could one explain the content of the relativity theory in a few sentences?
  • 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.
  • Time past and time future
    What might have been and what has been
    Point to one end, which is always present.
  • Time past and time future
    Allow but a little consciousness.
    To be conscious is not to be in time
    But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
    The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
    The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
    Be remembered; involved with past and future.
    Only through time time is conquered.     (II)
  • Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
    Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,
    The bitter apple, and the bite in the apple.
    And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
    Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
    On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
    In navigable weather it is always a seamark
    To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
    Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.
  • You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
    That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
  • Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
    Into different lives, or into any future;
    You are not the same people who left that station
    Or who will arrive at any terminus,
    While the narrowing rails slide together behind you.
  • Here between the hither and the farther shore
    While time is withdrawn, consider the future
    And the past with an equal mind.
  • A people without history
    Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
    Of timeless moments.
  • Lots of things take time, and time was Momo's only form of wealth.
  • All dwelling in one house are strange brothers three,
    as unlike as any three brothers could be,
    yet try as you may to tell brother from brother,
    you'll find that the trio resemble each other.
    The first isn't there, though he'll come beyond doubt.
    The second's departed, so he's not about.
    The third and the smallest is right on the spot,
    And manage without him the others could not.
    Yet the third factor with which to be reckoned
    Because the first brother turns into the second.
    You cannot stand back and observe number three,
    For one of the others is all you will see.
    So tell me, my child, are the three of them one?
    Or are there but two? Or could there be none?
    Just name them, and you will at once realize
    That each rules a kingdom of infinite size.
    They rule it together and are it as well.
    In that, they're alike, so where do they dwell?

F

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Time is Life. ~ Michael Ende
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 a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was — only is. ~ William Faulkner
Time is money. ~ Benjamin Franklin
Dost thou love life? then do not squander time; for that is the stuff life is made of. ~ Benjamin Franklin
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. ~ Robert Frost
It is the future that creates his present.
All is an interminable chain of longing. ~ Robert Frost
  • It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world's roaring rim.
  • Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was — only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow. I like to think of the world I created as being a kind of keystone in the universe; that, small as that keystone is, if it were ever taken away the universe itself would collapse.
  • The best general means to insure the profitable employment of our time, is to accustom ourselves to living in continual dependence upon the Spirit of God and His law, receiving, every instant, whatever He is pleased to bestow; consulting Him in every emergency requiring instant action, and having recourse to Him in our weaker moments when virtue seems to fail.
    • François Fénelon, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 583
  • Time is money.
  • Dost thou love life? then do not squander time; for that is the stuff life is made of.
    • Benjamin Franklin, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 582
  • Time had passed. It will, given half the chance.
  • It is the future that creates his present.
    All is an interminable chain of longing.

G

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Yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream ~ Khalil Gibran
And is not time even as love is, undivided and paceless? ~ Khalil Gibran
Embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing. ~ Khalil Gibran
The timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness. ~ Khalil Gibran
The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be. ~ William Gibson
We often refer to space as the final frontier. But the older I get, the more I come to believe that the true final frontier is time. In command, as in life, what we do in crisis often weighs upon us less heavily than what we wish we had done, what could have been. Time offers many opportunities, but it rarely offers second chances. ~ Jean-Luc Picard
One always has time enough, if one will apply it well. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages. ~ Horace Greeley
Time is always moving on; nothing can stop it. We can’t change the past, but we can shape the future. The more compassionate you are, the more you will find inner peace. ~ Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
  • “You know what they say about time,” Jacob said idly. “It’s what happens even when nothing else does.”
    • Rivka Galchen, The Region of Unlikeness (2008), reprinted in Rich Horton (ed.), The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2009 (p. 152)
  • Monday could not have arrived on a worse day. It could have been polite and waited until Tuesday or even Wednesday.
  • Mr. La Forge, time is one thing we do not have in abundance.
    • Spoken by Jean-Luc Picard, in Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Contagion" (20 March 1989) by Steve Gerber and Beth Woods
    • This line echoes a line from "Star Trek: TOS", episode "The Paradise Syndrome", in which Spock says "Time, Dr. McCoy, is the one thing we do not have in abundance." It has become a catch-phrase for Trekkies.
  • We often refer to space as the final frontier. But the older I get, the more I come to believe that the true final frontier is time. In command, as in life, what we do in crisis often weighs upon us less heavily than what we wish we had done, what could have been. Time offers many opportunities, but it rarely offers second chances. And as steps forward go I would like to acknowledge your classmate the first fully Romulan cadet at Starfleet Academy: Elnor. May you all go boldly into a future freed from the shackles of the past.
  • [T]ime has nothing to show because time won't give me time.
    • Boy George, "Time" (1982)
  • Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing. Yet the timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness, And knows that 'yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream.
  • And is not time even as love is, undivided and paceless? But if in you thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons, And let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.
  • Goliath: If I didn't fear the damage you would do to the time stream, I'd gladly leave you here.
    David Xanatos: But you won't, because you didn't. Time travel's funny that way.
  • Man hat immer Zeit genug, wenn man sie gut anwenden will.
    • One always has time enough, if one will apply it well.
    • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, The Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, trans. John Oxenford (1974), vol. 2, book 10, p. 16. Reported in United States Library of Congress, Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
  • In October 1672 Jean Richer... had sailed to the South American island of Cayenne... While there, he noticed that the pendulum clock he had brought... ran ever so slightly slower than it did in Paris. ...When he shortened the three-foot pendulum by just one twelfth of an inch, it corrected the error. ... Isaac Newton, he immediately guessed the cause. The island of Cayenne, situated almost on the Equator, was farther from the center of the Earth's gravitational pull... As the pendulum reached the top of its swing... the gravitational pull would be slightly less... Richer's discovery revealed that the Earth almost certainly bulged at the Equator... one of the first observational confirmations of Newton's theory of gravity. Meanwhile, for Buffon at least, it established that when the world formed, it was molten.
    • Martin Gorst, Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time (2001)
  • It's his last book. He wrote in in 1881, the year before he died, and usually we expect that in old age, just before death, that a great scientist will write a pontificating philosophical treatise on the nature of reality. And Darwin... wrote a book on worms. ...He was interested in worms because they were... a metaphor for his larger world-view. The worms that slowly churn the topsoil of England... that work literally beneath our feet, that we never notice, that we think are insignificant because they're so small and lowly, are in fact producing the very soil that is the basis of agriculture. And therefore Darwin uses it as a metaphor for the importance of apparently tiny things when you extend them over long periods of time. And that's what evolution is, the extension of small change (to Darwin) over vast periods of time. So the worms become a metaphor for evolution and for the whole process of temporal change, a very fascinating book.
  • Thirty days hath November,
    April, June, and September,
    February hath xxviii alone,
    And all the rest have xxxi.
    • Richard Grafton, Abridgement of the Chronicles of Englande (1570); 8vo; "A rule to knowe how many dayes every moneth in the yeare hath."
    • Variations include:
      • Thirty days hath September,
        April, June, and November;
        February eight-and-twenty all alone,
        And all the rest have thirty-one:
        Unless that leap-year doth combine,
        And give to February twenty-nine.
        • Return from Parnassus (London, 1606).
      • Thirty days hath September,
        April, June, and November;
        All the rest have thirty-one
        Excepting February alone:
        Which hath but twenty-eight, in fine,
        Till leap year gives it twenty-nine.
      • Thirty days has September,
        April, June, and November;
        All the rest have thirty-one,
        Except for second month alone:
        To which we donate twenty-eight,
        'Till leap year brings us twenty-nine.
        • Common in New England States.
      • Fourth, eleventh, ninth, and sixth,
        Thirty days to each affix;
        Every other thirty-one,
        Except the second month alone.
        • Common in Chester Co., Pa., among the Friends; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 524
  • The thing about time is, there’s so much of it between so little.
  • The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.
    • Horace Greeley, as quoted in The American Conflict, A History of the Great Rebellion (1864).
  • Time for us embraces a whole field of 'before and after', but Aristotle says: 'Before and after are involved in motion, but time is these so far as they are numbered' (Phys. 223a28). Elsewhere he defines time as 'the number of motion in respect of before and after', and he could seriously discuss the question whether there could be time without conscious and thinking beings; 'for if there could be no one to count, there could be nothing counted. ...If nothing can count but soul, and within soul mind, there cannot be time without soul, but only the substratum of time' (ibid. 219b2, 223a22)
    • W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy Vol. 1, "The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans" (1962)
  • We speak of a clock as an instrument for measuring time. In Plato and Aristotle's scheme of things, time (χρόνος) is itself a kind of clock. ...At one point Plato notes ...'men scarcely realize that the journeyings of these planets are time.' ...time is to be actually identified with the planetary motions.
    • W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy Vol. 1, "The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans" (1962)
  • We may... go to our... statement from Aristotle's treatise on the Pythagoreans, that according to them the universe draws in from the Unlimited time and breath and the void. The cosmic nucleus starts from the unit-seed, which generates mathematically the number-series and physically the distinct forms of matter. ...it feeds on the Unlimited outside and imposes form or limit on it. Physically speaking this Unlimited is [potential or] unformed matter... mathematically it is extension not yet delimited by number or figure. ...As apeiron in the full sense, it was... duration without beginning, end, or internal division—not time, in Plutarch's words, but only the shapeless and unformed raw material of time... As soon... as it had been drawn or breathed in by the unit, or limiting principle, number is imposed on it and at once it is time in the proper sense. ...the Limit, that is the growing cosmos, breathed in... imposed form on sheer extension, and by developing the heavenly bodies to swing in regular, repetitive circular motion... it took in the raw material of time and turned it into time itself.
    • W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy Vol. 1, "The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans" (1962)
  • Time is always moving on; nothing can stop it. We can’t change the past, but we can shape the future. The more compassionate you are, the more you will find inner peace.

H

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As we speak cruel time is fleeing. Seize the day, believing as little as possible in the morrow. ~ Horace
Time will bring to light whatever is hidden; it will cover up and conceal what is now shining in splendor. ~ Horace
  • The difficulties which so many have felt in the doctrine of Negative and Imaginary Quantities in Algebra forced themselves long ago on my attention... And while agreeing with those who had contended that negatives and imaginaries were not properly quantities at all, I still felt dissatisfied with any view which should not give to them, from the outset, a clear interpretation and meaning... It early appeared to me that these ends might be attained by our consenting to regard Algebra as being no mere Art, nor Language, nor primarily a Science of Quantity; but rather as the Science of Order in Progression. It was, however, a part of this conception, that the progression here spoken of was understood to be continuous and unidimensional: extending indefinitely forward and backward, but not in any lateral direction. And although the successive states of such a progression might (no doubt) be represented by points upon a line, yet I thought that their simple successiveness was better conceived by comparing them with moments of time, divested, however, of all reference to cause and effect; so that the "time" here considered might be said to be abstract, ideal, or pure, like that "space" which is the object of geometry. In this manner I was led, many years ago, to regard Algebra as the Science of Pure Time: and an Essay, containing my views respecting it as such, was published in 1835. ...[I]f the letters A and B were employed as dates, to denote any two moments of time, which might or might not be distinct, the case of the coincidence or identity of these two moments, or of equivalence of these two dates, was denoted by the equation,
    B = A
    which symbolic assertion was thus interpreted as not involving any original reference to quantity, nor as expressing the result of any comparison between two durations as measured. It corresponded to the conception of simultaneity or synchronism; or, in simpler words, it represented the thought of the present in time. Of all possible answers to the general question, "When," the simplest is the answer, "Now:" and it was the attitude of mind, assumed in the making of this answer, which (in the system here described) might be said to be originally symbolized by the equation above written.
    • William Rowan Hamilton, Preface, Lectures on Quaternions: Containing a Systematic Statement of a New Mathematical Method of which the Principles were Communicated in 1843 to the Royal Irish Academy... (1853) pp. 1-4. Hamilton makes reference to the article "Theory of Conjugate Functions, or Algebraic Couples; with a Preliminary and Elementary Essay on Algebra as the Science of Pure Time" (Read November 4th, 1833, and June 1st, 1835) Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy Vol. XVII, Part II (Dublin, 1835) pp 293-422.
  • The present moment
    contains past and future.
    The secret of transformation,
    is in the way we handle this very moment.
  • "The life of this world is made up of three days: yesterday has gone with all that was done; tomorrow, you may never reach; but today is for you so do what you should do today."
  • We wish to exhibit history and nature so that we may regard them before scientific elaboration, so that we may see both realities in their reality. This means that we wish to arrive at a horizon from which history and nature can be originally contrasted. This horizon must must itself be a field of constituents against which history and nature stand out in relief. Laying out this field is the task of the "prolegomena to a phenomenology of history and nature." We shall approach this task... by way of a history of the concept of time.
    ...both historical reality and natural reality are continuities that run their course in time... In natural science, especially in its basic science of physics, the measurement of time plays a fundamental role in defining its objects. The investigation of historical reality is completely incomprehensible without a chronology, an ordination of time. Viewed simply from the outside, history and nature are temporal. To the totality of temporal reality we tend to juxtapose the extratemporal constituents which, for example, are the topic of research in mathematics. In addition... we are familiar with supratemporal constituents in metaphysics or theology, understood as eternity. In a very schematic and crude way, time already announces itself as one 'index' for the differentiation and delimitation of domains of being as such. The concept of time discloses particulars about type and reality for such a demarcation of the universal realm of entities. It becomes, according to the particular stage of its development as a concept, a guide for the question of the being of entities and their potential regions. This occurs without an expressly fundamental consciousness of such a role, which is thus fulfilled in a correspondingly crude way, without bringing to the fore the possibilities which are implied in such an orientation. The concept of time is therefore... linked to the basic question of philosophy, if indeed this asks about the being of entities, the actuality of the actual, the reality of the real.
    • Martin Heidegger, University of Marburg Lectures for the course "Prolegomena zu einer Phänomenologie von Geschichte und Natur" (1925) as quoted in History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (2009) Tr. Theodore Kisiel
  • The history of the concept of time is the history of the discovery of time and the history of its conceptual interpretation. ...it is the history of the question of the being of entities, the history of the attempts to uncover entities in their being, borne by the particular understanding of time, by the particular level of conceptual elaboration of the phenomenon of time. Hence, in the end, the history of the concept of time is more accurately the history of the decline and the history of the distortion of the basic question of scientific research into the being of entities. It is the history of the incapacity to pose the question of being in a radically new way and to work out its fundamentals anew—an incapacity which is grounded in the being of Dasein.
    • Martin Heidegger, University of Marburg Lectures for the course "Prolegomena zu einer Phänomenologie von Geschichte und Natur" (1925) as quoted in History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (2009) Tr. Theodore Kisiel
  • Any concepts or words which have been formed in the past through the interplay between the world and ourselves are not really sharply defined with respect to their meaning: that is to say, we do not know exactly how far they will help us in finding our way in the world. We often know that they can be applied to a wide range of inner or outer experience, but we practically never know precisely the limits of their applicability. This is true even of the simplest and most general concepts like "existence" and "space and time". Therefore, it will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.
    The concepts may, however, be sharply defined with regard to their connections. This is actually the fact when the concepts become part of a system of axioms and definitions which can be expressed consistently by a mathematical scheme. Such a group of connected concepts may be applicable to a wide field of experience and will help us to find our way... But the limits of the applicability will in general not be known, at least not completely.
    • Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (1958) Lectures delivered at University of St. Andrews, Scotland, Winter 1955-56.
  • The way in which the convergent mathematical schemes did not fulfill the requirements of relativity and quantum theory was... interesting. ...[O]ne scheme ...interpreted in terms of actual events in space and time, led to a...time reversal... The physicists are convinced... that the processes... do not occur in nature... if... separated by measurable distance in space and time. ...If we assume that the laws of nature do contain a third universal constant... of the order of 10-13 cm, then... our usual concepts... apply only to regions in space and time that are large compared to the universal constant. We should... be prepared for phenomena of a qualitatively new character when we... approach regions... smaller than the nuclear radii. The phenomenon of time reversal... might therefore belong to these smallest regions.
  • Time is a game played beautifully by children.
    • Heraclitus, as quoted in Fragments (2001), translated by Brooks Haxton
  • Whan the sunne shinth make hay, whiche is to say,
    Take time whan time comth, lest time steale away.
    • When the sun shines make hay, which is to say,
      Take time when time comes, lest time steal away.
    • John Heywood, Proverbs (1546) Part I, chapter 3.
  • Old Tune, 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.
  • ...dum loquimur, fugerit invida
    aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
    • As we speak cruel time is fleeing. Seize the day, believing as little as possible in the morrow.
    • Horace, Odes (c. 23 BC and 13 BC), Book I, ode xi, line 8
  • Quidquid sub terra est, in apricum proferet ætas;
    Defodiet condetque nitentia.
    Time will bring to light whatever is hidden; it will cover up and conceal what is now shining in splendor.
  • Observe a method in the distribution of your time. Every hour will then know its proper employment, and no time will be lost
    • Bishop George Horne, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 583

I

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The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll
By comparing long periods of time, we more clearly perceive the advance that has been made. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll
The present is the child, and the necessary child, of all the past, and the mother of all the future. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll
  • So much has already been accomplished for the workingman that I have hope, and great hope, of the future. The hours of labor have been shortened, and materially shortened, in many countries. There was a time when men worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day. Now, generally, a day’s work is not longer than ten hours, and the tendency is to still further decrease the hours. By comparing long periods of time, we more clearly perceive the advance that has been made. In 1860, the average amount earned by the laboring men, workmen, mechanics, per year, was about two hundred and eighty-five dollars. It is now about five hundred dollars, and a dollar to-day will purchase more of the necessaries of life, more food, clothing and fuel, than it would in 1860. These facts are full of hope for the future.

J

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Hours are like diamonds, don't let them waste... Time waits for no one, no favors has he ~ Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
From its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future. ~ Jewish intellectuals in The New York Times
Transition is a complete present which unites the past and the future in a momentary progressive ecstasy, a progressive eternity, a true eternity of eternities, eternal moments ~ Juan Ramón Jiménez
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. ~ Steve Jobs
Remember the past with gratitude, live the present with enthusiasm and look forward to the future with confidence. ~ Pope John Paul II
  • Yes, star-crossed in pleasure, the stream flows on by
    Yes, as we're sated in leisure, we watch it fly, yes
    And time waits for no one, and it won't wait for me...
    Time can tear down a building or destroy a woman's face
    Hours are like diamonds, don't let them waste
    Time waits for no one, no favors has he
  • A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition. When we say an artist is in a state of transition, many believe that we are belittling. In my opinion when people speak of an art of transition this indicates a better art and the best that art can give. Transition is a complete present which unites the past and the future in a momentary progressive ecstasy, a progressive eternity, a true eternity of eternities, eternal moments. Progressive ecstasy is above all dynamic; movement is what sustains life and true death is nothing but lack of movement, be the corpse upright or supine. Without movement life is annihilated, within and without, for lack of dynamic cohesion. But the dynamism should be principally of the spirit, of the idea, it should be a moral dynamic ecstasy, dynamic in relation to progress, ecstatic in relation to permanence.
    • Juan Ramón Jiménez, "Heroic Reason", as translated by H. R. Hays, in Selected Writings of Juan Ramon Jimenez (1957) edited by Eugenio Florit, p. 231
  • Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
  • At the beginning of the new millennium, and at the close of the Great Jubilee during which we celebrated the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Jesus and a new stage of the Church's journey begins, our hearts ring out with the words of Jesus when one day, after speaking to the crowds from Simon's boat, he invited the Apostle to "put out into the deep" for a catch: "Duc in altum" (Lk 5:4). Peter and his first companions trusted Christ's words, and cast the nets. "When they had done this, they caught a great number of fish" (Lk 5:6). Duc in altum! These words ring out for us today, and they invite us to remember the past with gratitude, to live the present with enthusiasm and to look forward to the future with confidence: "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever" (Heb 13:8).
    • Pope John Paul II, Apostolic Letter Novo Millenio Ineunte of His Holiness John Paul II to the Bishop Clergy and Lay Faithful at the close of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 (6 January 2001). Archived from the original on April 16, 2022.
  • [A] feature in the Valentinian account of creation is instructive regarding the much-debated question of the "Platonism" of the Gnostics. The world was created after the image of the invisible world of the Pleroma by a Demiurge carrying out unwittingly his mother's intention. His ignorance, however, was not complete, as is shown in the following...

    When the Demiurge further wanted to imitate the timeless nature of the upper Ogdoad (the original eight Aeons in the Pleroma), but could not express their immutable eternity, being as he was a fruit of defect, he embodied their eternity in the times, epochs, and great numbers of years, under the delusion that by the quantity of times he could represent their infinity. Thus truth escaped him and he followed the lie. Therefore his work shall pass away when the times are fulfilled. (Iren. I. 17. 2)

    This of course is a parady of the famous passage in the Timaeus (37 C ff.) where Plato describes the creation of time as "the moving image of eternity." The vast gulf that divides the spirit of this imitation will be evident to anyone who takes the trouble to compare the two passages.

K

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Let us transfix this momentary eternity which encloses everything, past and future, but without losing in the immobility of language any of its gigantic erotic whirling. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis
Times can blind us to certain truths. ~ Anthony Kennedy
We celebrate the past to awaken the future. ~ John F. Kennedy
We must use time as a tool, not as a couch. ~ John F. Kennedy
We need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future. ~ John F. Kennedy.
We must think and act not only for the moment but for our time. ~ John F. Kennedy
Time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future. ~ John F. Kennedy
There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed. ~ Robert F. Kennedy
Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. ... Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • Let us transfix this momentary eternity which encloses everything, past and future, but without losing in the immobility of language any of its gigantic erotic whirling.
  • But Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: "Stay, thou art so fair." And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past are certain to miss the future.
    • John F. Kennedy, in a speech at Paulskirche in Frankfurt, West Germany, 25 June 1963; as printed in John Fitzgerald Kennedy, The Burden and the Glory (1964), p. 115
    • Variant: Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.
      • Documents on International Affairs, 1963, Royal Institute of International Affairs, ed. Sir John Wheeler Wheeler-Bennett, p. 36
    • Variant: But Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: "Stay, thou art so fair." And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.
  • There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.
  • To say that the future will be different from the present is, to scientists, hopelessly self-evident. I observe regretfully that in politics, however, it can be heresy. It can be denounced as radicalism, or branded as subversion. There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed. It hardly seems necessary to point out in California - of all States -- that change, although it involves risks, is the law of life.
  • The Bird of Time has but a little way
    To flutter — and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing
  • Without restlessness time does not really exist: it does not exist for the animal, which is completely devoid of restlessness; and the clock that tells the time cannot do so when the restlessness ceases. But when the restlessness, as in the case of the merely temporal expectancy oscillates between fulfillment and nonfulfillment in such a way that the movement becomes swifter in time because the vanishing of time, the fact that time is passing, accelerates the restlessness, then of course the fulfillment, it if does not come in time, cannot come at all-when this is the case, the expectancy corrodes. Finally the restlessness apparently passes away; alas, this is precisely when the sickness has taken the form of consumption.
  • The misfortune of our age is precisely that it has become merely time by itself, temporality, which impatiently wants to hear nothing about eternity and subsequently, well-intentioned or furious, even wants to make the eternal utterly superfluous by means of a contrived imitation, which will never in all eternity succeed, because the more we think we are able to or harden our hearts to be able to dispense with the eternal, all the more do we stand basically in need of just that.
    • The Point of View On My Work As An Author by Soren Kierkegaard (finished 1848) published by Peter Christian Kierkegaard 1859 translated by Howard and Edna Hong 1998 Princeton University Press P. 104 (Two “Notes” Concerning My Work As An Author by S. Kierkegaard)
  • The power of time is great. In time we may not perceive this, because time slyly steals from one a little at a time; perhaps we will really find this out for the first time in eternity, when we will once more, and in retrospect examine what we with the help of time and the forty hears have managed to pack up. Yes, time is a dangerous power. In time it is so easy to begin over again from the beginning and then forget where one left off. Therefore even when one begins to read a very big book and does not quite trust one’s memory, one puts marks in the book. Ah, but with regard to one’s whole life, how often a person forgets to put in marks in order to be able to take notice properly!
    • Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 1847 Hong 1995 p. 354
  • Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself—its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again.
  • If there is meaning in the past and in the imagined future, it is captured in the moment. When you have all the time in the world, you can spend it, not on going somewhere, but on being where you are.
  • In many indigenous ways of knowing, time is not a river, but a lake in which the past, the present, and the future exist. Creation, then, is an ongoing process and the story is not history alone—it is also prophecy.
  • Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.

L

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Time: a great engraver, or eraser. ~ Yahia Lababidi
If you love life, don't waste time, for time is what life is made up of. ~ Bruce Lee. See Benjamin Franklin above.
The flow of time is always cruel... its speed seems different for each person, but no one can change it... A thing that does not change with time is a memory of younger days... ~ "Sheik", The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Time passes [...] Like a river's flow, it never ends. ~ "Sheik", The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
It appears that the time has finally come for you to start your adventure! You will encounter many hardships ahead... That is your fate. Don't feel discouraged, even during the toughest times! ~ "Kaepora Gaebora", The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past? ~ John Leonard
O Time! consumer of all things; O envious age! thou dost destroy all things and devour all things with the relentless teeth of years, little by little in a slow death. ~ Leonardo da Vinci
The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present. ~ Leonardo da Vinci
We may not have chosen the time, but the time has chosen us. ~ John Lewis
Think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. ~ Abraham Lincoln
Life — a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter. ~ Charles Lindbergh
Time is a valuable thing
Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings
Watch it count down to the end of the day
The clock ticks life away ~ Linkin Park
There is only one thing in your life YOU can be sure of. That one thing is this moment, now. The last moment has gone forever. The next moment has not come. YOU can become fully conscious only when you are living in the moment. ~ Barry Long
Time′s the only cure. ~ Lost Frequencies
  • Time: a great engraver, or eraser.
    • Yahia Lababidi (b. 1973), Egyptian-Lebanese essayist and poet. Signposts to Elsewhere (2008)
  • That is the only true time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people’s time, not his.
  • Curious it is that every hour of our day is repeated from myriad chimes; and yet how rarely do we attend to the clock striking ! Alas ! how emblematic is this of the way in which we neglect the many signs of time ! How terrible, when we think of what time may achieve, is the manner in which we waste it! At the end of every man's life, at least three-quarters of the mighty element of which that life was composed will be found void—lost—nay, utterly forgotten ! And yet that time, laboured and husbanded, might have built palaces, gathered wealth, and, still greater, made an imperishable name.
  • Time past on as lightly as he always steps over flowers, Brussels carpets, marble terraces, green turfs, or whatever simile may best express a path without an impediment.
  • The history of a minute — why, it would give a bird's-eye view of every possible variety in human existence. Wonderful the many events that are happening together — life and death — joy and sorrow— the great and the mean — the common and the rare — good and evil — are all in the record of that brief segment of time.
  • Time passed as time ever does when passed monotonously, that is, with a degree of rapidity which only astonishes us when it is recalled to mind by some chance circumstance. Time should he reckoned by events, not hours ; the heart is its truest time-piece, at least as concerns ourselves.
  • This hour will pass — all passes,
    On this life's fleeting scene ;
    But still the future glasses
    All that the past has been.
  • I do not wish here to discuss the question, intensely interesting though it be, as to whether time can be said really to exist, or whether it is but a limitation of this lower consciousness, and all that we call time — past, present and future alike — is 'but one eternal Now'; I wish only to show that when the ego is freed from physical trammels, either during sleep, trance or death, he appears to employ some transcendental measure of time which has nothing in common with our ordinary physiological one. A hundred stories might be told to prove this fact... It seems that in the Koran there is a wonderful narrative concerning a visit paid one morning by the prophet Mohammed to heaven, during which he saw many different regions there, had them all very fully explained to him, and also had numerous lengthy conferences with various angels; yet when he returned to his body, the bed from which he had risen was still warm, and he found that but a few seconds had passed — in fact, I believe the water had not yet all run out from a jug which he had accidentally overturned as he started on the expedition!
  • Look up here! It appears that the time has finally come for you to start your adventure! You will encounter many hardships ahead... That is your fate. Don't feel discouraged, even during the toughest times!
  • The flow of time is always cruel... its speed seems different for each person, but no one can change it... A thing that does not change with time is a memory of younger days...
  • It is something that grows over time... a true friendship. A feeling in the heart that becomes even stronger through time...The passion of friendship will soon blossom into a righteous power and through it, you'll know which way to go...
  • Time passes, people move...Like a river's flow, it never ends. A childish mind will turn to noble ambition...Young love will become deep affection... The clear water's surface reflects growth...
  • Perhaps the most important way the urban bourgeoisie spread its culture was the revolution it affected in the mental categories of medieval man. The most spectacular of these revolutions, without a doubt, was the one that concerned the concept of and measurement of time.
    • Jacques Le Goff, The Fontana Economic History of Europe: The Middle Ages (1971)
  • As for my own opinion, I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something merely relative, as time is; that I hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions. For space denotes, in terms of possibility, an order of things which exist at the same time, considered as existing together; without inquiring into their particular manner of existing. And when many things are seen together, one perceives that order of things among themselves.
  • Suppose someone asks why God did not create everything a year sooner; and that the same person wants to infer from that that God did something for which He cannot possibly have had a reason why He did it thus rather than otherwise, we should reply that his inference would be true if time were something apart from temporal things, for it would be impossible that there should be reasons why things should have been applied to certain instants rather than to others, when their succession remained the same. But this itself proves that instants apart from things are nothing, and that they only consist in the successive order of things; and if this remains the same, the one of the two states (for instance that in which the creation was imagined to have occurred a year earlier) would be nowise different and could not be distinguished from the other which now exists.
  • Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?
    • John Leonard, Private Lives in the Imperial City (1979), "Dash" (p. 146)
  • Truth was the only daughter of Time.
    • Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations., as translated by Edward MacCurdy
  • O Time! consumer of all things; O envious age! thou dost destroy all things and devour all things with the relentless teeth of years, little by little in a slow death. Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing the withered wrinkles made in her face by old age, wept and wondered why she had twice been carried away.
    • Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations., as translated by Edward MacCurdy
  • Men are in error when they lament the flight of time, accusing it of being too swift, and not perceiving that it is sufficient as it passes; but good memory, with which nature has endowed us, causes things long past to seem present.
    • Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations., as translated by Edward MacCurdy
  • The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present.
    • Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations., as translated by Edward MacCurdy
  • We are deceived by promises and time disappoints us...
    • Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations., as translated by Edward MacCurdy
  • O time, swift robber of all created things, how many kings, how many nations hast thou undone, and how many changes of states and of various events have happened since the wondrous forms of this fish perished here in this cavernous and winding recess. Now destroyed by time thou liest patiently in this confined space with bones stripped and bare; serving as a support and prop for the superimposed mountain.
    • Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations., as translated by Edward MacCurdy
  • * My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you in hot haste to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it.
  • Life — a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.
  • Time is a valuable thing
    Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings
    Watch it count down to the end of the day
    The clock ticks life away
  • There is only one thing in your life YOU can be sure of. That one thing is this moment, now. The last moment has gone forever. The next moment has not come. YOU can become fully conscious only when you are living in the moment. To begin to live in the moment you have to know it exists and understand it. To understand it you have to observe it in relation to yourself and in relation to life. When you understand it, when you become conscious, you will see it is all that exists. To see this is to glimpse reality.
  • The more you observe life in relation to yourself the more you will see the fact that you are hardly ever correct when you think about something in the future. The future exists only in imagination; and that is why, no matter how hard you try to imagine it, you will not be able to predict the future with total certainty.
  • Time exists not by itself; but simply from the things which happen, the sense apprehends what has been done in time past, as well as what is present, and what is to follow after.
  • The time is always right to do what’s right.
    • Martin Luther King Jr., at a speech delivered in Finney Chapel at Oberlin College (October. 22, 1964), as reported in "When MLK came to Oberlin" by Cindy Leise (The Chronicle-Telegram; January 21, 2008)

M

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Time drives everything before it, and is able to bring with it good as well as evil, and evil as well as good. ~ Niccolò Machiavelli
Time contains the seeds of all things, good as well as bad. ~ Niccolò Machiavelli
Tomorrow's life is too late; live today. ~ Martial
Who has time? Who has time? But then if we never take time, how can we have time? ~ The Merovingian in The Matrix Reloaded
Time is a mystery which man cannot endure to contemplate until eternal Truth enlighten it. ~ James Clerk Maxwell
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
The past has meaning as it lights up the present, and the future as it makes the present richer and more profound. ~ Rollo May
We have only so much time. We need to use it well. ~ Cindy McCain
There are moments in our lives we fear to relive and others we long to repeat. While time cannot give us second chances, maybe people can. ~ Jean-Luc Picard
  • The modern Father Time, like the classical Saturn, reflected the paradox that time both consumes and brings to fruition. During the sixteenth century, just when Time was being portrayed as the most malevolent of creatures... he was also developing the dualism of a quite different reputation as the father of Truth. Samuel Chew, in The Virtues Reconciled, has shown that from the eleventh century there developed an important allegory in which Truth and Justice, Peace and Mercy were widely represented as the daughters of God. Fritz Saxl, in his essay "Veritas Filia Temporas," had earlier demonstrated that Time too had a paternity to Truth, who, according to Democritus, lay at the bottom of a deep well. Despite the implied sacrilege in the conflicting claims to paternity, Time's claim held good; this was probably because it was so useful an allegory in the conflict between Protestant and Catholic.
    • Samuel L. Macey, "Time as the Father of Truth: A More Positive Connotation in the Sixteenth Century," Patriarchs of Time: Dualism in Saturn-Cronus, Father Time, the Watchmaker God, and Father Christmas (2010)
  • Il tempo si caccia innanzi ogni cosa, e può condurre seco bene come male, male come bene.
    • Time drives everything before it, and is able to bring with it good as well as evil, and evil as well as good.
  • The Romans never allowed a trouble spot to remain simply to avoid going to war over it, because they knew that wars don't just go away, they are only postponed to someone else's advantage. Therefore, they made war with Philip and Antiochus in Greece, in order not to have to fight them in Italy... They never went by that saying which you constantly hear from the wiseacres of our day, that time heals all things. They trusted rather their own character and prudence — knowing perfectly well that time contains the seeds of all things, good as well as bad.
  • How awful that silent, unceasing footfall of receding days is when once we begin to watch it! Inexorable, passionless— though hope and fear may pray, " Sun, stand thou still on Gibeon, and thou moon in the valley of Ajalon," — the tramp of the hours goes on. The poets paint them as a linked chorus of rosy forms, garlanded and clasping hands as they dance onwards. So they may be to some of us at some moments. So they may seem as they approach; but those who come hold the hands of those that go, and that troop have no rosy light upon their limbs, their garlands are faded, the sunshine falls not upon the gray and shrouded shapes, as they steal ghost like through the gloom.
    • Alexander Maclaren, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 584
  • Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
    • Norman Mailer, "Hip, Hell, and the Navigator" in Western Review No. 23 (Winter 1959); republished in Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988) edited by J. Michael Lennon.
  • Time is composed of time-atoms, i.e., of many parts, which on account of their short duration, cannot be divided. The Mutakallemim undoubtedly saw how Aristotle proved that time, space, and locomotion are of the same nature. ...They, therefore, knew that if time were continuous and divisible ad infinitum, their assumed atom of space would of necessity likewise be divisible. Similarly, if it were supposed that space were continuous... the time-element... could also be divided. This has been shown by Aristotle in... Acroasis [Aristotelis stagyritae acroases physicae]. ...An hour is, e.g., divided into sixty minutes, the second into sixty parts and so on; at last after ten or more successive divisions by sixty, time-elements are obtained which are not subjected to division, and in fact are indivisible.
  • Time plays now on the quietest of flutes.
    • Drunk from the Bitter Truth: The Poems of Anna Margolin translated from Yiddish by Shirley Kumove (2017)
  • Non est, crede mihi, sapientis dicere ‘Vivam’:
    Sera nimis vita est crastina: vive hodie.
    • Believe me, wise men don’t say ‘I shall live to do that’, tomorrow's life is too late; live today.
    • Variant translation: Tomorrow will I live, the fool does say; Today itself's too late; the wise lived yesterday.
    • Martial, Epigrams (c. 80-104 AD), I, 15
  • Underlying this succession of moments which constitutes the superficial existence of beings and things, and which is continually modifying and transforming them, one can search for a truer, more essential character, which the artist will seize so that he may give to reality a more lasting interpretation.
    • Henri Matisse, "Notes of a Painter", La Grande Revue (December 25, 1908) as translated by Jack D. Flam in Matisse on Art (1978) p. 37. Flam's translation was originally published in 1973.
  • He that would enjoy life and act with freedom must have the work of the day continually before his eyes. Not yesterday's work, lest he fall into despair; nor to-morrow's, lest he become a visionary—not that which ends with the day, which is a worldly work; nor yet that only which remains to eternity, for by it he cannot shape his actions.
    Happy is the man who can recognise in the work of to-day a connected portion of the work of life and an embodiment of the work of Eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises because the present is given him for a possession.
    Thus ought Man to be an impersonation of the divine process of nature, and to show forth the union of the infinite with the finite, not slighting his temporal existence, remembering that in it only is individual action possible; nor yet shutting out from his view that which is eternal, knowing that Time is a mystery which man cannot endure to contemplate until eternal Truth enlighten it.
    • James Clerk Maxwell, Paper communicated to Frederic Farrar (1854) Æt. 23, as quoted in Lewis Campbell, William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell: With Selections from His Correspondence and Occasional Writings (1884) pp. 144-145, and in Richard Glazebrook, James Clerk Maxwell and Modern Physics (1896) pp. 39-40.
  • 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. The past and future have meaning because they are part of the present: a past event has existence now because you are thinking of it at this present moment, or because it influences you so that you, as a living being in the present, are that much different. The future has reality because one can bring it into his mind in the present. Past was the present at one time, and the future will be the present at some coming moment. To try to live in the "when" of the future or the "then" of the past always involves an artificiality, a separating one's self from reality; for in actuality one exists in the present. The past has meaning as it lights up the present, and the future as it makes the present richer and more profound.
    • Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself (1953), p. 227
  • I pondered my personal goals, too. My life could have ended that day at the restaurant, but I’d been given more time to be with my children and continue building a legacy. In some ways, we are only what we leave behind... We have only so much time. We need to use it well.
    • Cindy McCain, Stronger: Courage, Hope, and Humor in My Life with John McCain (April 2021)
  • Day and night,
    Seed-time and harvest, heat and hoary frost
    Shall hold their course, till fire purge all things new.
  • Fly, envious Time, till thou run out thy race:
    Call on the lazy leaden-stepping Hours,
    Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace;
    And glut thyself with what thy womb devours,
    Which is no more than what is false and vain,
    And merely mortal dross.
  • The Doctor: People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non linear subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey...stuff.
  • The Doctor: Ook, sorry, I've got a bit of a complex life. Things don't always happen to me in quite the right order. Gets a bit confusing at times, especially at weddings. I'm rubbish at weddings, especially my own.
  • As to Duration, I still think it is absolutely impossible to conceive it without something that exists, and continues to exist, i.e. to endure. But how it should be a property of the thing existing is to me inconceivable. One thing... is absolutely certain, viz. that if eternal Duration be a property of the Supreme Being, Duration limited must be a property of inferior beings; so that we have here some common property.
    I find you agree with Dr Clarke, in considering Time and Duration as the same. But this is an error that Dr Clarke has fallen into, by not being learned in the Ancient Metaphysics; for there he would have learned that time is only the measure of motion. It therefore could not exist, but with the material world; so that, if we could suppose nothing existing but the Supreme Mind, which is immoveable, there would in that case be Duration, or αίών,—as the Greek Philosophers call it—but not χρόνος, or Time. And the Doctor should not have rejected the common distinction, made by all Philosophers and Divines before him, betwixt Time and Eternity, without assigning better reasons than he has done.
  • “I am already late, I fear. What time is it?”
    “Time? Why the present, of course.”
  • You fail to understand, my friend. We do not control time. If anything, it controls us. We simply measure it.
  • Time is at once an agony of the Present, a long torment of the Past and the terrible prospect of countless Futures. Time is also a complex of subtly intersecting realities, of unguessable consequences and undiscoverable causes, of profound tensions and dependencies.
  • Doctor Manhattan: There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.
  • He who cannot find time to consult his Bible will one day find he has time to be sick; he who has no time to pray must find time to die; he who can find no time to reflect is most likely to find time to sin; he who cannot find time for repentance will find an eternity in which repentance will be of no avail; he who cannot find time to work for others may find an eternity in which to suffer for himself.
    • Hannah More, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 583
  • There was once a time when the life of men resembled that of beasts. They dwelt in mountain caves and dark ravines, for as yet there was no roofed house nor broad city fortified with stone towers. Nor did the curved ploughs cleave the black clod, nurse of the grain, nor the busy iron tend the fruitful rows of bacchic vines, but earth was barren. In mutual slaughter they dined on food of flesh. But when time, begetter and nurturer of all things, wrought a change in mortal life—whether of the solicitude of Prometheus, or from necessity, or by long experience, offering nature itself as teacher—then was discovered holy Demeter's gift, the nourishment of cultivated grain, and the sweet fount of Bacchus. The earth, once barren, began to be ploughed by yoked oxen, towered cities arose, men built sheltering homes and turned their lives from savage ways to civilized. From this time they made it a law to bury the dead or give unburied bodies their portion of dust, leaving no visible reminder of their former impious feasts.
    • Moschion (ca. 3rd century BC) as quoted by W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy Vol. 3, "The Fifth Century Enlightenment" (1971) from an unknown play "in the spirit of the late fifth of fourth century BC."
  • There is a road that turning always
    Cuts off the country of Again.
    Archers stand there on every side
    And as it runs time's deer is slain
    And lies where it has lain.
  • Was it by reason of the collective Christian desire to provide for the welfare of souls in eternity by regular prayers and devotions that time-keeping and the habits of temporal order took hold of men's minds: habits that capitalist civilization presently turned to good account? One must perhaps accept the irony of this paradox. ...Time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing. ...Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human activities.
  • The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.
    • Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934)
  • The clock... is a piece of power-machinery whose "product" is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science. ...while human life has regularities of its own... time is measured not by the calendar but by the events that occupy it. ...if growth has its own duration and regularities, behind it are not simply matter and motion but the facts of development: in short, history. And while mechanical time is strung out in a succession of mathematically isolated instants, organic time—what Bergson calls duration—is cumulative in its effects. ...organic time moves only in one direction—through the cycle of birth, growth, development, decay, and death—and the past that is already dead remains present in the future that has still to be born.
    • Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934)
  • One... characteristic of medieval space must be noted: space and time form two relatively independent systems. First: the medieval artist introduced other times within his own spatial world, as when he projected the events of Christ's life within a contemporary Italian city, without the slightest feeling that the passage of time has made a difference, just as in Chaucer the classical legend of Troilus and Cressida is related as if it were a contemporary story. When a medieval chronicler mentions the King... it is sometimes difficult to find out whether he is talking about Caeser or Alexander the Great or his own monarch: each is equally near to him. ...the word anachronism is meaningless when applied to medieval art... in Botticelli's The Three Miracles of St. Zenobius, three different times are presented upon a single stage.
    • Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934)
  • Because of the separation of time and space, things could appear and disappear suddenly, unaccountably: the dropping of a ship below the horizon no more needed an explanation than the dropping of a demon down the chimney. There was no mystery about the past from which they had emerged, no speculation about the future toward which they were bound: objects swam into vision and sank out of it with something of the same mystery in which the coming and going of adults affect the experience of young children, whose first graphic efforts so much resemble in their organization the world of the medieval artist. In this symbolic world of space and time everything was either a mystery or a miracle.
    • Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934)
  • Time-saving... became an important part of labor-saving. And as time was accumulated and put by, it was reinvested, like money capital, in new forms of exploitation. From now on filling time and killing time became important considerations: the early paleotechnic employers even stole time from their workers by blowing the factory whistle... earlier in the morning, or moving the hands of the clock... during lunch... Time was a commodity in the sense that money had become a commodity. Time as pure duration, time dedicated to contemplation and reverie, time divorced from mechanical operations, was treated as heinous waste. The paleotechnic world did not heed Wordsworth's Expostulation and Reply: it had no mind to sit on an old gray stone and dream its time away.
    • Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934)
  • Under capitalism time-keeping is not merely a means of co-ordinating and inter-relating complicated functions: it is also like money an independent commodity with a value of its own.
  • Now if the laws of nature hold constant over time—if the rules and patterns of today are the same as those of yesterday and tomorrow—then a valid physical equation will depend only on elapsed time. ...Do we have a universe in which the rules of the game are fixed... or ...a universe in which they vary from moment to moment? ...Nobody knows for sure... On the largest scales, over unimaginably great intervals of space and time, the laws of nature do seem to show a sense of history. ...Newton's mechanical equations specify only differences in time, ascribing no absolute meaning to each instant. The same goes for Maxwell's electromagnetic equations. The same goes for Schrödinger's quantum mechanical equations. The same goes for Einstein's equations of relativity. The same goes for so many other equations that describe so much of the physical universe.
    For us, open-minded but nonetheless emphasizing this ahistorical aspect of nature, our clocks will tick and tock without any reference to any absolute starting point.
    • Michael Munowitz, Knowing: The Nature of Physical Law (2005) pp. 54-55.

N

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The past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru
  • The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future? [...] Nevertheless the past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now.
  • Hitherto I have laid down the definitions of such words as are less known, and explained the sense in which I would have them to be understood in the following discourse. I do not define time, space, place and motion, as being well known at all. Only I must observe, that the vulgar conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which, it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common.
    I. Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent and common time is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month or a year.
    • Isaac Newton, Principia (1687) Andrew Motte Tr. The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1803) Vol. 1, Book 1, Scholium
  • I consider time as flowing or increasing by continual flux & other quantities as increasing continually in time & from ye fluxion of time I give the name of fluxions to the velocitys wth wch all other quantities increase. ...I expose time by any quantity flowing uniformly and represent its fluxion by an unit, & the fluxions of other quantities I represent by any other fit symbols... This Method is derived immediately from Nature her self.
    • Isaac Newton, draft review of Commercium epistolicum (1712) The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton (1969) Vol. 3, ed. D. T. Whiteside, p. 17.
  • A foot of jade is of no value, an inch of time is to be prized.

O

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If we don't care about our past we can't have very much hope for our future. ~ Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Time, in its stealthy gliding, cheats us all
Without our notice; nothing goes more swiftly
Than do the years. ~ Ovid
Nothing is permanent in all the world.
All things are fluent; every image forms,
Wandering through change. ~ Ovid
Now I have done my work. It will endure,
I trust, beyond Jove's anger, fire and sword,
Beyond Time's hunger. ~ Ovid
  • Tempus edax rerum
  • Labitur occulte fallitque volatilis aetas,
    et nihil est annis velocius.
    • Time, in its stealthy gliding, cheats us all
      Without our notice; nothing goes more swiftly
      Than do the years.
  • Nihil est toto, quod perstet, in orbe.
    Cuncta fluunt, omnisque vagans formatur imago.
    • Nothing is permanent in all the world.
      All things are fluent; every image forms,
      Wandering through change.
      • Ovid, Metamorphoses (Transformations), Book XV, lines 177–178 (trans. R. Humphries)
  • Sic tempora verti
    cernimus atque illas adsumere robora gentes,
    concidere has.
    • Times are upset, we see, and nations rise
      To strength and greatness, others fail and fall.
      • Ovid, Metamorphoses (Transformations), Book XV, lines 420–422 (trans. A. D. Melville)
  • Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis
    nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas.
    • Now I have done my work. It will endure,
      I trust, beyond Jove's anger, fire and sword,
      Beyond Time's hunger.
      • Ovid, Metamorphoses (Transformations), Book XV, lines 871–872 (trans. R. Humphries)

P

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Being successful doesn’t make you manage your time well. Managing your time well makes you successful! ~ Randy Pausch
Time is all you have and you may find one day that you have less than you think. ~ Randy Pausch
We don't beat the reaper by living longer, but by living well, and living fully — for the reaper will come for all of us. The question is: what do we do between the time we're born and the time he shows up. ~ Randy Pausch
Time makes more converts than reason. ~ Thomas Paine
Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long. ~ Cesare Pavese
Time is the wisest counselor of all. ~ Pericles
Be ruled by time, the wisest counsellor of all. ~ Pericles
Time's revolving wheels shall lose at last
The speed that spins the future and the past:
And, sovereign of an undisputed throne,
Awful eternity shall reign alone. ~ Petrarch
The time will come when every change shall cease,
This quick revolving wheel shall rest in peace:
No summer then shall glow, not winter freeze;
Nothing shall be to come, and nothing past,
But an eternal now shall ever last. ~ Petrarch
Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. But I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment because they'll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we've lived. ~ Jean-Luc Picard
Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. ~ Neil Postman
  • Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you. He said, when you are pissed off at somebody, and you're angry at them, you just haven't given them enough time. Just give them a little more time — and they'll almost always impress you. And that really stuck with me. I think he's absolutely right on that one.
  • Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won't make us happier.
    • Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture (2008), expanded and revised publication version of his last lecture, Chapter 32: Don't Complain, Just Work Harder, p. 139
  • Time is all you have and you may find one day that you have less than you think."
    • Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture (2008), expanded and revised publication version of his last lecture
  • The key question to keep asking is, Are you spending your time on the right things? Because time is all you have."
    • Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture (2008), expanded and revised publication version of his last lecture
  • If I could only give three words of advice, they would be, "tell the truth." If I got three more words, I'd add: "All the time."
    • Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture (2008), expanded and revised publication version of his last lecture, Chapter 48: Tell the Truth, p. 163
  • We don't beat the reaper by living longer, but by living well, and living fully — for the reaper will come for all of us. The question is: what do we do between the time we're born and the time he shows up. Because when he shows up, it’s too late to do all the things that you’re always gonna, kinda get around to.
  • Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
  • Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
  • Time is the wisest counselor of all.
    • Pericles, as quoted in Until Tomorrow Comes (1979) by Orville E. Kelly, p. 160
  • Those spacious regions where our fancies roam,
    Pain'd by the past, expecting ills to come,
    In some dread moment, by the fates assign'd,
    Shall pass away, nor leave a rack behind;
    And Time's revolving wheels shall lose at last
    The speed that spins the future and the past:
    And, sovereign of an undisputed throne,
    Awful eternity shall reign alone.
  • The time will come when every change shall cease,
    This quick revolving wheel shall rest in peace:
    No summer then shall glow, not winter freeze;
    Nothing shall be to come, and nothing past,
    But an eternal now shall ever last.
  • Time began either simultaneously with the world or after it. For since time is a measured space determined by the world's movement, and since movement could not be prior to the object moving, but must of necessity arise either after it or simultaneously with it, it follows of necessity that time also is either coeval with or later born than the world.
    • Philo of Alexandria, On the Creation (ca. 15 CE) 26, as quoted by Paul Marston, Roger Forster, Reason, Science and Faith (2001) p. 193.
  • Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
    Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
    Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
    The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say.
  • Someone once told me, 'Time is a flat circle.' Everything we've ever done or will do, we're gonna do over and over and over again. And that little boy and that little girl, they're gonna be in that room again and again and again forever.
  • In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So Death created time to grow the things that it would kill and you are reborn but into the same life that you've always been born into. I mean, how many times have we had this conversation, detectives? Well, who knows? When you can't remember your lives, you can't change your lives, and that is the terrible and the secret fate of all life. You're trapped by that nightmare you keep waking up into.
  • So when the universe was quickened with soul, God was well pleased; and he bethought him to make it yet more like its type. And whereas the type is eternal and nought that is created can be eternal, he devised for it a moving image of abiding eternity, which we call time. And he made days and months and years, which are portions of time; and past and future are forms of time, though we wrongly attribute them also to eternity. For of eternal Being we ought not to say 'it was', 'it shall be', but 'it is' alone: and in like manner we are wrong in saying 'it is' of sensible things which become and perish; for these are ever fleeting and changing, having their existence in time.
  • And when the father who begat it perceived the created image of the eternal gods, that it had motion and life, he rejoiced and was well pleased; and he bethought him to make it yet more nearly like its pattern. Now whereas that is a living being eternally existent, even so he essayed to make this All the like to the best of his power. Now so it was that the nature of the ideal was eternal. But to bestow this attribute altogether upon a created thing was impossible; so he bethought him to make a moving image of eternity, and while he was ordering the universe he made of eternity that abides in unity an eternal image moving according to number, even that which we have named time. For whereas days and nights and months and years were not before the universe was created, he then devised the generation of them along with the fashioning of the universe. Now all these are portions of time, and was and shall be are forms of time that have come to be, although we wrongly ascribe them unawares to the eternal essence. For we say that it was and is and shall be, but in verity is alone belongs to it: and was and shall be it is meet should be applied only to Becoming which moves in time; for these are motions. But that which is ever changeless without motion must not become elder or younger in time, neither must it have become so in past nor be so in the future; nor has it to do with any attributes that Becoming attaches to the moving objects of sense: these have come into being as forms of time, which is the image of eternity and revolves according to number. Moreover we say that the become is the become, and the becoming is the becoming, and that which shall become is that which shall become, and not-being is not-being. In all this we speak incorrectly. But concerning these things the present were perchance not the right season to inquire particularly.
    • Plato, Timaeus (ca. 360 BC) 38B, as quoted by R. D. Archer-Hind, The Timaeus of Plato (1888)
  • Time then has come into being along with the universe, that being generated together, together they may be dissolved, should a dissolution of them ever come to pass; and it was made after the pattern of the eternal nature, that it might be as like to it as was possible. For the pattern is existent for all eternity; but the copy has been and is and shall be throughout all time continually. So then this was the plan and intent of God for the generation of time; the sun and the moon and five other stars which have the name of planets have been created for defining and preserving the numbers of time. ...and a month is fulfilled when the moon, after completing her own orbit, overtakes the sun; a year, when the sun has completed his own course. But the courses of the others men have not taken into account, save a few out of many... they do not know that time arises from the wanderings of these, which are incalculable in multitude and marvellously intricate. None the less however can we observe that the perfect number of time fulfils the perfect year at the moment when the relative swiftnesses of all the eight revolutions accomplish their course together and reach their starting-point, being measured by the circle of the same and uniformly moving. In this way then and for these causes were created all such of the stars as wander through the heavens and turn about therein, in order that this universe may be most like to the perfect and ideal animal by its assimilation to the eternal being.
  • May I discard the outer cover of time
    from the layers of poetry
    by immersing the poet in its entirety
    within me.
  • I’ve climbed up here
    holding the hilt of time’s sword
    after driving it
    into my tender heart.
  • May I not so much be lost as would have no time to look at myself ever.
  • Years following years steal something ev'ry day.
    At last they steal us from ourselves away.
    • Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace (1733 to 1738), Book II, Epistle 2, line 72
  • Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. From a biological point of view it is inconceivable that any culture will forget that it needs to reproduce itself. But it is quite possible for a culture to exist without a social idea of children. Unlike infancy, childhood is a social artifact, not a biological category.
    • Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), Introduction
  • Hours are golden links, God's token
    Reaching heaven; but one by one
    Take them, lest the chain be broken
    Ere the pilgrimage be done.
    • Adelaide Anne Procter, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 583
  • All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.

R

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We face the future fortified with the lessons we have learned from the past. It is today that we must create the world of the future. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
We cannot procrastinate. The world of the future is in our making. Tomorrow is now. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
Time is scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm — we who smite like the scythe. ~ John Ruskin
New times demand new measures and new men. ~ James Russell Lowell
  • It's weird how I am constantly surprised by the passage of time when it's literally the most predictable thing in the Universe.
  • Time is at once the most valuable and the most perishable of all our possessions.
    • John Randolph of Roanoke. William Cabell Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke, 1773–1833, vol. 2, chapter 7, p. 205 (1922, reprinted 1970). Reported in United States Library of Congress, Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
  • Time, they say, heals every wound; but not, I think, love or hunger.
  • (8) In the religion of Zoroaster it is revealed. Except Time, all other things are created. Time is the creator; and Time has no limit, neither top nor bottom. It has always been and shall be for evermore. No sensible person will say whence Time has come. In spite of all the grandeur that surround it, there was no one to call it creator; for it had not brought forth creation. (9) Then it created fire and water; and when it had brought them together, Ohrmazd came into existence, and simultaneously Time became Creator and Lord with regard to the creation it had brought forth. ...(12) Then did Ohrmazd begin <the work of creation>. Whatever Ohrmazd did, he did it with the aid of Time; for all the excellence that Ohrmazd needed, had (already) been created.
    • Persian Rivayâts, Tr. B. N. Dhabhar (1913) as quoted by R. C. Zaehner, Zurvan, A Zoroastrian Dilemma (1955)
  • We face the future fortified with the lessons we have learned from the past. It is today that we must create the world of the future. Spinoza, I think, pointed out that we ourselves can make experience valuable when, by imagination and reason, we turn it into foresight.
  • What we must learn to do is to create unbreakable bonds between the sciences and the humanities. We cannot procrastinate. The world of the future is in our making. Tomorrow is now.
  • The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
    • Eleanor Roosevelt, as quoted in Leonard C. Schlup and Donald W. Whisenhunt, It Seems to Me: Selected Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt (2001), p. 2.
  • To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.
  • Time is... the expression of our ignorance of the full microstate.
  • Einstein asked himself a question... how can the sun and the Earth "attract" each other without touching..? ...[H]e imagined that the sun and the Earth each modified the space and time that surrounded them, just as a body in water displaces the water... This modification of the structure of time influences in turn the movement of the bodies, causing them to "fall" toward one another. ...The Earth is a large mass and slows down time in its vicinity. ...If things fall, it is due to this slowing of time. ...Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things do not fall. ...[H]ere on ...our planet, the movement of things inclines naturally toward where time passes more slowly, as when we run ...into the sea and the resistance of the water on our legs makes us fall headfirst... [T]ime passes more slowly for your feet than it does for your head.
  • You talk of the scythe of Time, and the tooth of Time: I tell you, Time is scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm — we who smite like the scythe. It is ourselves who abolish — ourselves who consume: we are the mildew, and the flame.
    • John Ruskin, A Joy for Ever, lecture II, section 74 (1857)
  • The arguments for the contention that time is unreal and that the world of sense is illusory must, I think, be regarded as fallacious. Nevertheless there is some sense—easier to feel than to state—in which time is an unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality. Past and future must be acknowledged to be as real as the present, and a certain emancipation from slavery to time is essential to philosophic thought. The importance of time is rather practical than theoretical, rather in relation to our desires than in relation to truth. A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is. Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.
  • I think that the timelessness of mathematics has none of the sublimity that it once seemed to me to have, but consists merely in the fact that the pure mathematician is not talking about time. ...I think that we can ...mirror the world, like Leibniz's monads; and I think it is the duty of the philosopher to make himself as undistorting a mirror as he can. ...to recognize such distortions ...Of these, the most fundamental is that we view the world from the here and now, not with that large impersonality which theists attribute to the Deity. To achieve such impartiality is impossible for us, but we can travel a certain distance towards it. To show the road to this end is the supreme duty of the philosopher.
    • Bertrand Russell, "The Retreat from Pythagoras," My Philosophical Development (1959)
  • New times demand new measures and new men;
    The world advances, and in time outgrows
    The laws which in our father's times were best;
    And doubtless, after us, some purer scheme
    Will be shaped out by wiser men than we,
    Made wiser by the steady growth of truth.

S

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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. ~ George Santayana
The purpose of time is to enable you to learn how to use time constructively. It is thus a teaching device and a means to an end. Time will cease when it is no longer useful in facilitating learning. ~ Helen Schucman
Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn. ~ Delmore Schwartz
Time discovers truth. ~ Seneca the Younger
Time is the nurse and breeder of all good. ~ William Shakespeare
Make use of time, let not advantage slip;
Beauty within itself should not be wasted:
Fair flowers that are not gather'd in their prime
Rot and consume themselves in little time. ~ William Shakespeare
All that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity. ~ William Shakespeare
Time is the old justice that examines all such offenders, and let Time try. ~ William Shakespeare
There's a time for all things. ~ William Shakespeare
Come what come may,
Time and the hour runs through the roughest day. ~ William Shakespeare
See the minutes, how they run,
How many make the hour full complete;[...] ~ William Shakespeare
How many hours bring about the day;
How many days will finish up the year;
How many years a mortal man may live. ~ William Shakespeare
Quotation
Courage is never born with a person; time and circumstances inject it into a person and bring it forth from within. ~ Sanu Sharma
Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we don't know if it even exists... ~ Clifford D. Simak
Time, time, time,
see what's become of me,
While I looked around,
For my possibilities;
I was so hard to please.
But look around, leaves are brown
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter.
~ Paul Simon
There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven... ~ Solomon
Time in its slow, illimitable course
Brings all to light and buries all again. ~ Sophocles
Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day. ~ Sophocles
All I need is time
A moment that is mine. ~ Britney Spears
Seize the time... Live now. Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again. ~ Jean-Luc Picard
May I discard the outer cover of time
from the layers of poetry
by immersing the poet in its entirety
within me.
~ Suman Pokhrel
  • Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
    • This famous statement has produced many paraphrases and variants:
      • Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
      • Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes.
      • Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it.
      • Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.
      • Those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them.
    • There is a similar quote by Edmund Burke that often leads to misattribution, "People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors."
    • George Santayana The Life of Reason (1905-1906), Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense
  • The purpose of time is to enable you to learn how to use time constructively. It is thus a teaching device and a means to an end. Time will cease when it is no longer useful in facilitating learning.
  • Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn.
  • Urbes constituit ætas: hora dissolvit: momento fit cinis: diu sylva.
    An age builds up cities: an hour destroys them. In a moment the ashes are made, but a forest is a long time growing.
  • Contra primus itaque causas pugnare debemus; causa autem iracundiae opinio iniuriae est, cui non facile credendum est. Ne apertis quidem manifestisque statim accedendum; quaedam enim falsa ueri speciem ferunt. Dandum semper est tempus: ueritatem dies aperit.
    • The cause of anger is the belief that we are injured; this belief, therefore, should not be lightly entertained. We ought not to fly into a rage even when the injury appears to be open and distinct: for some false things bear the semblance of truth. We should always allow some time to elapse, for time discloses the truth.
      • Seneca the Younger, Moral Essays, De Ira (On Anger): Book 2, cap. 22, line 2, as translated by Aubrey Stewart.
    • Alternate translation: Time discovers truth. (translator unknown).
  • Nemo tam divos habuit faventes,
    Crastinum ut possit sibi polliceri.
    Nobody has ever found the gods so much his friends that he can promise himself another day.
  • Time's glory is to calm contending kings,
    To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light.
  • Make use of time, let not advantage slip;
    Beauty within itself should not be wasted:
    Fair flowers that are not gather'd in their prime
    Rot and consume themselves in little time.
  • Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off,
    And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
    Do not forever with thy vailèd lids
    Seek for thy noble father in the dust:
    Thou know'st tis common; all that lives must die,
    Passing through nature to eternity.
  • Let's take the instant by the forward top;
    For we are old, and on our quick'st decrees
    The inaudible and noiseless foot of Time
    Steals ere we can effect them.
  • And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye,
    Says very wisely, "It is ten o'clock:
    Thus we may see," quoth he, "how the world wags."
  • Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I'll tell you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal.
  • There's a time for all things.
    • William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors (c. 1592-1594), Act II, scene 2, line 66
    • Compare The Bible, Ecclesiastes 3:1: To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.
  • The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite,
    That ever I was born to set it right!
  • See the minutes, how they run,
    How many make the hour full complete;
    How many hours bring about the day;
    How many days will finish up the year;
    How many years a mortal man may live.
  • Minutes, hours, days, months, and years,
    Pass'd over to the end they were created,
    Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave.
    Ah, what a life were this!
  • Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides;
    Who cover faults, at last shame them derides.
  • If you can look into the seeds of time,
    And say which grain will grow and which will not;
    Speak then to me.
  • Come what come may,
    Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.
  • I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
    For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
    My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
    Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
    Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
    Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
    Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
    Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
    Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans
    Show minutes, times, and hours.
  • Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
    Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
    A great-sized monster of ingratitudes;
    Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'd
    As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
    As done.
  • Time is like a fashionable host
    That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,
    And with his arms outstretch'd, as he would fly
    Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles.
  • Beauty, wit,
    High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
    Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
    To envious and calumniating time.
  • Courage is never born with a person; time and circumstances inject it into a person and bring it forth from within."

"Sometimes, to do wrong deeds, one's intentions don't have to be bad; unfavorable timing and circumstances might lead one to do so."

  • Walk around feeling like a leaf.
    Know you could tumble any second.
    Then decide what to do with your time.
  • Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we don't know if it even exists...
  • Time, time, time, see what's become of me,
    While I looked around,
    For my possibilities;
    I was so hard to please.
    But look around, leaves are brown
    And the sky is a hazy shade of winter.
  • Time in its slow, illimitable course
    Brings all to light and buries all again    ;
    Strange things it brings to pass, the dreadest oath
    Is broken and the stubbornest will is bent.
  • Do nothing secretly; for Time sees and hears all things, and discloses all.
  • Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day.
    • Sophocles, Jocasta (Line 977?) in Oedipus Rex
  • Time eases all things.
  • I used to think
    I had the answers to everything
    But now I know
    Life doesn't always
    Go my way, yeah
    Feels like I'm caught in the middle
    That's when I realize

    I'm not a girl
    Not yet a woman
    All I need is time
    A moment that is mine
    While I'm in between
  • Even when all the worlds have frozen or exploded, and all the suns gone dead and cold, there'll still be time. Oh, God, what for?
  • I do not presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating myself, and am I only by being not presupposed but posited, and ... only in the moment when I posit myself.
    • Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own (1844), S. Byington, trans. (Cambridge: 1995), p. 135
  • The unique aspect of biblical faith is that immediate, mundane history is beheld, affirmed, and lived as the true story of the redemption of time and Creation. Biblical ethics constitute a sacramental participation in history as it happens. ... In this saga, time is transcended within the events of a single day—today—so that all that is past, from the first day, is consummated and is anticipated; so that today is esteemed in its real dignity, as if it were the first day, as if it were the last day, as if it were the only day, as if today and eternity were one.
  • While Babylon represents the principality in bondage to death in time—and time is actually a form of that bondage—Jerusalem means the emancipation of human life in a society from the rule of death and breaks through time, transcends time, anticipates within time the abolition of time.
  • If a congregation somewhere comes to life as Jerusalem at some hour, that carries no necessary implications for either the past or the future of that congregation. The Jerusalem occurrence is sufficient unto itself. There is—then and there—a transfiguration in which the momentary coincides with the eternal, the innocuous becomes momentous and the great is recognized as trivial, the end of history is revealed as the fulfillment of life here and now, and the whole of creation is beheld as sanctified.
  • No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent.
  • Time was a flickering gray fire constantly consuming all things, so that what appeared to be motion was actually the oxidation and reduction of possibilities, the collapse of potential matter from grace to nothingness.
  • For the sake of research,
    the big picture
    and definitive conclusions,
    one would have to transcend time,
    in which everything scurries and whirls.

T

[edit]

In time there is no present,
In eternity no future,
In eternity no past.

We laugh, we cry, we are born, we die.
Who will riddle me the how and the why? ~ Alfred Tennyson

Make use of time, if thou valuest eternity. Yesterday cannot be recalled; to-morrow cannot be assured; to-day only is thine, which, if thou procrastinatest, thou losest, which loss is lost forever. ~ Jeremy Taylor
Time heals all wounds. ~ Terence
The future has taken root in the present. ~ Chris Terrio
This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel,
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down. ~ Riddle by J. R. R. Tolkien
Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. ~ Eckhart Tolle
Past and future must coexist with the present. Like a landscape extending as far as the eye can see, physical time exists in its entirety at once. The canvas of time stretches from the horizon of the past to the horizon of the future. All distinction between past, present and future is but an illusion. ~ Trinh Xuan Thuan
This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel,
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down. ~ J. R. R. Tolkien
All that we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. ~ J. R. R. Tolkien
Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait. ~ Leo Tolstoy
The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience. ~ Leo Tolstoy
“[...] Patience and time are my warriors, my champions,” thought Kutúzov. He knew that an apple should not be plucked while it is green. It will fall of itself when ripe, but if picked unripe the apple is spoiled, the tree is harmed, and your teeth are set on edge. ~ Leo Tolstoy
  • Since usurers sell nothing but the hope of money, that is time, they sell the day and the night. But the day is the time of light, and the night is the time of rest; therefore, they sell light and rest. It would not be right, therefore, for them to enjoy eternal light and rest.
  • Make use of time, if thou valuest eternity. Yesterday cannot be recalled; to-morrow cannot be assured; to-day only is thine, which, if thou procrastinatest, thou losest, which loss is lost forever.
    • Jeremy Taylor, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 582
  • Diem adimere aegritudinem hominibus.
    • Time removes distress.
      • Act III, scene 1, line 12 (421).
    • Variant translations:
    • Time heals all wounds.
    • Time assuages sorrow.
    • Terence, Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor)
  • The Unseasonable man is one who will go up to a busy person, and open his heart to him. He will serenade his mistress when she has a fever. He will address himself to a man who has been cast in a surety-suit, and request him to become his security. He will come to give evidence when the trial is over.
  • We all have our time machines, don't we? Those that take us back are memories. Those that carry us forward are dreams.
  • Psychological time does not conform to Einstein's physical time. If... my future can be my friend's past, and if my neighbor's past can be my present, then the past cannot be completed and the future is not yet to be made. Past and future must coexist with the present. Like a landscape extending as far as the eye can see, physical time exists in its entirety at once. The canvas of time stretches from the horizon of the past to the horizon of the future. All distinction between past, present and future is but an illusion. ...physical time neither flows nor passes. It exists as a single entity; it simply is.
  • This thing all things devours:
    Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
    Gnaws iron, bites steel,
    Grinds hard stones to meal;
    Slays king, ruins town,
    And beats high mountain down.
  • To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the resent moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions. But without a sense of time, how would we function in this world? There would be no goals to strive toward anymore. I wouldn't even know who I am, because my past makes me who I am today. I think time is something very precious, and we need to learn to use it wisely rather than waste it. p. 36
  • Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time - past and future - the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is. Why is it the most precious thing? Firstly, because it is the only thing. It's all there is. The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be. Secondly, the Now is the only point that can take you beyond the limited confines of the mind. It is your only point of access into the timeless and formless realm of Being. p. 36
  • The essence of what I am saying here cannot be understood by the mind. The moment you grasp it, there is a shift in consciousness from mind to Being, from time to presence. Suddenly, everything feels alive, radiates energy, emanates Being.... In life-threatening emergency situations, the shift in consciousness from time to presence sometimes happens naturally. The personality that has a past and a future momentarily recedes and is replaced by an intense conscious presence, very still but very alert at the same time. Whatever response is needed then arises out of that state of consciousness... The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now - that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality. p. 37
  • Time is what the ego lives on. The stronger the ego, the more time takes over your life. Almost every thought you think is then concerned with past or future, and you sense of self depends on the past for your identity and on the future for its fulfillment. Fear, anxiety, expectation, regret, guilt, anger are the dysfunctions of the timebound state of consciousness. p. 123
  • I recently met some old friends, a family I had not seen in a long time, and I was shocked when I saw them. I almost asked, “Are you ill? What happened? Who did this to you?” The mother, who walked with a cane, seemed to have shrunk in size, her face shriveled like an old apple. The daughter , who had been full of energy, enthusiasm, and the expectations of youth when I last saw her, seemed worn out, tired after bringing up three children. Then I remembered: Almost thirty years had passed since we last met. Time had done this to them. p. 125
  • Everything seems to be subject to time, yet it all happens in the Now. That is the paradox. Wherever you look, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence for the reality of time – a rotting apple, your face in the bathroom mirror compared to your face in a photo taken thirty years ago – yet you never find any direct evidence, you never experience time itself. You only ever experience the present moment, or rather what happens in it. If you go by direct evidence only, then there is no time, and the Now is all there ever is. p. 125
  • Time, that is to say, past and future, is what the false mindmade self, the ego, lives on, and time is in your mind. It isn't something that has an objective existence “out there.” It is a mind structure needed for sensory perception, indispensable for practical purposes, but the greatest hindrance to knowing yourself. Time is the horizontal dimension of life, the surface layer of reality. p. 126
  • Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.
  • The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.
  • “They must understand that we can only lose by taking the offensive. Patience and time are my warriors, my champions,” thought Kutúzov. He knew that an apple should not be plucked while it is green. It will fall of itself when ripe, but if picked unripe the apple is spoiled, the tree is harmed, and your teeth are set on edge.
  • When your legs get weaker time starts running faster.
    • Mikhail Turovsky (b. 1933), Russian-American artist and aphorist. Itch of Wisdom Cicuta Press (1986)

U

[edit]
It's just a moment, this time will pass. ~ U2

V

[edit]
Time bears away all things, even our minds. ~ Virgil
But meanwhile time flies; it flies never to be regained. ~ Virgil
It may be that in the future you will be helped by remembering the past. ~ Virgil
Endure the hardships of your present state,
Live, and reserve yourselves for better fate. ~ Virgil
What is time? It is a serpent which eats its tail [...]. ~ Kurt Vonnegut
Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away. ~ Kurt Vonnegut
All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. ~ Kurt Vonnegut
All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. ~ Kurt Vonnegut
  • Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus.
    • But meanwhile time flies; it flies never to be regained.
    • Virgil, Georgics (c. 29 BC), III. 284
  • Omnia fert aetas, animum quoque.
    • Time bears away all things, even our minds.
    • Virgil, Eclogues (c. c. 42 BC), Book IX, line 51
  • Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
    • It may be that in the future you will be helped by remembering the past.
    • Virgil, Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book I, line 203
  • Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis.
    • 'Endure the hardships of your present state,
      Live, and reserve yourselves for better fate.
    • Virgil, Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book I, line 207
  • The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
    When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."
    • Billy writing a letter to a newspaper describing the Tralfamadorians
    • Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five, Or The Children's Crusade : A Duty-dance with Death (1969)
  • All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.
  • What is time? It is a serpent which eats its tail [...].
    • Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions, Or Goodbye Blue Monday! (1973)
  • Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away.

W

[edit]
I accept Time absolutely.
It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all,
That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. ~ Walt Whitman
  • Time has two aspects. For civil and some scientific purposes, we want to know the time of day so that we can order events in sequence. In much scientific work, we want to know how long an event lasts. Thus, any time standard must be able to answer two questions: “When did it happen?” and “What is its duration?”
    • Jearl Walker, David Halliday, and Robert Resnick, Fundamentals of Physics (10th ed., 2014), Ch. 1. Measurement
  • Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry of Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.
  • If I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence; I become absent minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of time any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should we not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time Dimension; or even to turn about and travel the other way?
  • There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.
  • Over a large part of the civilized world it was believed and taught that the world had been created suddenly in 4004 B.C., though authorities differed as to whether this had occurred in the spring or autumn of that year. ... Such ideas have long since been abandoned by religious teachers, and it is universally recognized that the universe in which we live has to all appearances existed for an enormous period of time and possibly for endless time. Of course there may be deception in these appearances, as a room may be made to seem endless by putting mirrors facing each other at either end.
  • The point is that in the past the time-span of important change was considerably longer than that of a single human life. Thus mankind was trained to adapt itself to fixed conditions.
    To-day the time-span is considerably shorter than that of human life, and accordingly our training must prepare individuals to face a novelty of conditions.
  • ... throughout mathematics, in one sense, transition does not enter. The interconnections are displayed in their timeless eternity. It is true that the notions of time, and of approach, and of approximation, occur in mathematical discourse. But as used in the science, the timefulness of time and the motion of approach are abstracted from.
  • A word of the faith that never balks,
    Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.
    It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all,
    That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all.
  • It must have required enormous effort for man to overcome his natural tendency to live like the animals in a continual present. Moreover, the development of rational thought actually seems to have impeded man's appreciation for the significance of time. ...Belief that the ultimate reality is timeless is deeply rooted in human thinking, and the origin of rational investigation of the world was the search for permanent factors that lie behind the ever-changing pattern of events.
  • Throughout Iranian thought there was a tendency to dualism... two distinct forms or aspects of time were recognized: indivisible time, that is the eternal 'now', and time that is divisible into successive parts. The former represented the creative aspect of time and was fundamental. It was called Zurvan akarana, or infinite time, and was the progenitor of the universe and of the spirits of good and evil. Associated with the universe was the other form of time called Zurvan daregho-chvadhata, that is the time of long dominion, or finite time. This was the time that brought decay and death. It dominated the world of man and was represented by the celestial firmament. ...The whole reason for the existence of finite time appears to have been to bring about that conflict of good and evil which eventually leads to the triumph of the former. ...Finite time begins and ends with the rule of Ohrmazd. At a given moment finite time came into existence out of infinite time. It goes through a cycle of changes until it finally returns to its original state and then merges into infinite time.
    • Gerald James Whitrow, Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day (1988)
  • The continuing evolution of our idea of time is revealed by the increasing importance of tense in the development of language. Greater knowledge of the universe has been accompanied by greater appreciation of the distinction between past, present, and future as people have learned to transcend the limitations of 'the eternal present'. Although our awareness of time is based on psychological factors and on physiological processes below the level of consciousness, ...it is also dependent on social and cultural influences. Because of these, there is a reciprocal relation between time and history. For, just as our idea of history is based on that of time, so time as we conceive it is a consequence of our history.
  • The idea that time may be an active factor in causation has the mathematical significance that ' t ' (for the system in question) must appear explicitly in the formulation of the law. ...Such law may claim to express the fact of historic, irreversible duration.
  • The question of the reversibility of natural processes provides the key to a great intellectual struggle which is now behind the complexities of philosophic and scientific thought. The issue can be formulated thus: Is there a real temporal process in nature? Is the passage of irreversible time a necessary element in any view of the structure of nature? Or, alternatively, is the subjective experience of time a mere illusion of the mind which cannot be given objective expression? These are not metaphysical questions that can still be neglected with impunity. For just as Einstein made his advance by analysing conceptions such as simultaneity, which had been thought to be adequately understood for the purposes of experimental science, so the next development of physical theory will probably be made by carrying on the analysis of time from the point at which Einstein left it.
  • Time is a waste of money.
    • Oscar Wilde, Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894)
  • 'Tis in Philosophy, and that is made up of nothing else; but receives addition from every days experiment. True indeed, for Divinity we have an infallible rule that do's plainly inform us of all necessary Truths; and therefore the Primitive Times are of greater Authority, because they were nearer to those holy Men who were the Pen-Men of Scripture. But now for Philosophy, there is no such reason: What ever the School Men may talk; yet Aristotles works are not necessarily true, and he himself hath by sufficient Arguments proved himself to be liable unto errour. Now in this case, if we should speak properly, Antiquity do's consist in the old age of the World, not in the youth of it. In such Learning as may be increased by fresh experiments and new discoveries: 'Tis we are the Fathers, and of more Authority than former Ages; because we have the advantage of more time than they had, and Truth (we say) is the Daughter of Time.

X

[edit]
Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs only to the people who prepare for it today. ~ Malcolm X
Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. We must forge the future with the past. ~ Malcolm X
Countless choices define our fate: each choice, each moment, a moment in the ripple of time. Enough ripple, and you change the tide... for the future is never truly set. ~ Prof. Charles Xavier/Professor X
  • Education is an important element in the struggle for human rights. It is the means to help our children and our people rediscover their identity and thereby increase their self respect. Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs only to the people who prepare for it today.
    • Malcolm X, Speech at Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (28 June 1964), as quoted in By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter (1970).
  • Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold of it and forge the future with the past.
    • Malcolm X, Speech at Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (28 June 1964), as quoted in By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter (1970).
  • The future: a dark, desolate world. A world of war, suffering, loss on both sides. Mutants, and the humans who dared to help them, fighting an enemy we cannot defeat. Are we destined down this path, destined to destroy ourselves like so many species before us? Or can we evolve fast enough to change ourselves... change our fate? Is the future truly set? ... The past: a new and uncertain world. A world of endless possibilities and infinite outcomes. Countless choices define our fate: each choice, each moment, a moment in the ripple of time. Enough ripple, and you change the tide... for the future is never truly set.

Y

[edit]
  • “I can talk about time.” Mr. Rabbit took the watch from his waistcoat pocket again, and regarded its slow, jewelled face curiously. “So fragile, and yet the only unstoppable thing in this or any universe. Time.” He tapped the gently curved glass with his paw. “One second is such a tiny measure in the grand scheme of things. Yet one second can change so much. It is the difference between late and not late, between yesterday and today, and between here and gone.”
  • Nought treads so silent as the foot of Time;
    Hence we mistake our autumn for our prime.
  • The bell strikes one. We take no note of time
    But from its loss: to give it then a tongue
    Is wise in man.
  • Procrastination is the thief of time:
    Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
    And to the mercies of a moment leaves
    The vast concerns of an eternal scene.
  • Time is eternity;
    Pregnant with all eternity can give;
    Pregnant with all that makes archangels smile.
    Who murders Time, he crushes in the birth
    A power ethereal, only not adorn'd.
    • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night II, line 107
  • Time wasted is existence, used is life.
    • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night II, line 149
  • We push time from us, and we wish him back;
    * * * * * *
    Life we think long and short; death seek and shun.
    • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night II, line 174
  • In leaves, more durable than leaves of brass,
    Writes our whole history.
    • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night II, line 275
  • We see time's furrows on another's brow,
    * * * * *
    How few themselves in that just mirror see!

Bible

[edit]
The Bible on Wikisource
To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. ~ Ecclesiastes
  • To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.
    • Ecclesiastes 3:1
  • Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this.
    • Ecclesiastes 7:10
  • For the vision is yet for its appointed time, And it is rushing toward its end, and it will not lie. Even if it should delay, keep in expectation of it! For it will without fail come true. It will not be late!
  • My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle.
    • Job 7:6
  • Brothers and sisters, is that the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not; 30 those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep; 31 those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away.
  • I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succoured thee: behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.
  • A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.
    • Psalms 90:4
  • We spend our years as a tale that is told.
    • Psalms 90:9
  • There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven — A time to give birth, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted. A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to tear down, and a time to build up. A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance. A time to throw stones, and a time to gather stones; A time to embrace, and a time to shun embracing. A time to search, and a time to give up as lost; A time to keep, and a time to throw away. A time to tear apart, and a time to sew together; A time to be silent, and a time to speak. A time to love, and a time to hate; A time for war, and a time for peace.
    • Solomon, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 ("A Time for Everything")
  • Ungodly men by their words and deeds summoned death;
    considering him a friend, they pined away,
    and they made a covenant with him,
    because they are fit to belong to his party.
    For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves,
    "Short and sorrowful is our life,
    and there is no remedy when a man comes to his end,
    and no one has been known to return from Hades.
    Because we were born by mere chance,
    and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been;
    because the breath in our nostrils is smoke,
    and reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts.
    When it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes,
    and the spirit will dissolve like empty air.
    Our name will be forgotten in time,
    and no one will remember our works;
    our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud,
    and be scattered like mist
    that is chased by the rays of the sun
    and is overcome by its heat.
    For our allotted time is the passing of a shadow,
    and there is no return from our death,
    because it is sealed up and no one turns back."
    Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray,
    for their wickedness blinded them.
[edit]
The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904) by James William Norton-Kyshe, quotes from pp. 232-233.
  • It would certainly be a very great mistake to suppose that this Court does not attend to lapse of time.
  • This I take notice of, only to shew an uncertainty as to time.
    • Parker, L.C.J., Purchase's Case (1710), 16 How. St. Tr. 686
  • The time makes no difference in the reason of the thing.
    • Wilmot, J., Rex v. Inhabitants of Christchurch (1759), 2 Burr. Part IV. 949
  • Examining by hours is not so unprecedented. It was the old custom among the Romans to examine by the hour-glass.
    • Marlay, L.C.J., Trial of Mary Heath (1744), 18 How. St. Tr. 23. See Jory, 30
  • As for myself, whenever I sit upon the Bench (which is much oftener than I appear at the Bar), I always give the advocates as much water as they require; for I look upon it as the height of presumption to pretend to guess before a cause is heard what time it will require, as to set limits to an affair before one is acquainted with its extent, especially as the first and most sacred duty of a Judge is patience, which, indeed, is itself a very considerable part of justice. But the advocate will say many things that are useless. Granted. Yet is it not better to hear too much than not to hear enough? Besides, how can you know that the things are useless till you have heard them?
    • Attributed to Pliny by Lord Mackenzie, Studies in Roman Law, with Comparative Views of the Laws of France, England and Ireland, London, 1861, Blackwood

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)

[edit]
Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922). Quotes from pp. 792-801.
  • Six years—six little years—six drops of time.
  • Modo, et modo, non habebent modum.
    By-and-by has no end.
  • Backward, flow backward, O full tide of years!
    I am so weary of toil and of tears,
    Toil without recompense—tears all in vain,
    Take them and give me my childhood again.
    I have grown weary of dust and decay,
    Weary of flinging my heart's wealth away—
    Weary of sowing for others to reap;
    Rock me to sleep, mother, rock me to sleep.
    • A. M. W. Ball, Rock me to Sleep, Mother. Attributed to Elizabeth Akers Allen. See Northern Monthly, Volume II. 1868. Pub. by Allen line Bassett, Newark, N. J. Appendix to March, Volume II. 1868. Ball shows proof that he wrote it in 1856–7. Produces witness who saw it before 1860. Mrs. Allen says she wrote it in Italy, 1860. It was published in The Knickerbocker Magazine, May, 1861
  • Backward, turn backward, then time in your flight;
    Make me a child again just for tonight.
    Mother, come back from the echoeless shore,
    Take me again to your heart as of yore.
  • Why slander we the times?
    What crimes
    Have days and years, that we
    Thus charge them with iniquity?
    If we would rightly scan,
    It's not the times are bad, but man.
  • Le temps fuit, et nous traîne avec soi:
    Le moment où je parle est déjà loin de moi.
    Time flies and draws us with it. The moment in which I am speaking is already far from me.
  • What's not destroyed by Time's devouring hand?
  • Think not thy time short in this world, since the world itself is not long. The created world is but a small parenthesis in eternity, and a short interposition, for a time, between such a state of duration as was before it and may be after it.
  • Behind, he hears Time's iron gates close faintly,
    He is now far from them;
    For he has reached the city of the saintly,
    The New Jerusalem.
    • Rev. James D. Burns, Poem of a Death Believer, in the Vision of Prophecy
  • Some wee short hour ayont the twal.
  • Nae man can tether time or tide.
  • How slowly time creeps till my Phœbe returns!
    While amidst the soft zephyr's cool breezes I burn.
    Methinks if I knew whereabouts he would tread,
    I could breathe on his wings and 'twould melt down the lead.
    Fly swifter, ye minutes, bring hither my dear,
    And rest so much longer for 't when she is here.
  • The good old times—all times when old are good—
    Are gone.
  • Thinkst thou existence doth depend on time?
    It doth; but actions are our epochs; mine
    Have made my days and nights imperishable,
    Endless, and all alike.
  • Out upon Time! it will leave no more
    Of the things to come than the things before!
    Out upon Time! who forever will leave
    But enough of the past for the future to grieve.
  • He more we live, more brief appear
    Our life's succeeding stages;
    A day to childhood seems a year,
    And years like passing ages.
  • Time's fatal wings do ever forward fly;
    To every day we live, a day we die.
  • That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; 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: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb,—for we have no word to speak about it.
  • No ay memoria à quien el tiempo no acabe, ni dolor que nuerte no le consuma.
    There is no remembrance which time does not obliterate, nor pain which death does not put an end to.
  • Opinionum enim commenta delet dies; naturæ judicia confirmat.
    Time destroys the groundless conceits of men; it confirms decisions founded on reality.
    • Cicero, De Natura Deorum, II. 2
  • O tempora! O mores!
    O what times (are these)! what morals!
    • Cicero, Orationes in Catilinam, I. 2
  • No! no arresting the vast wheel of time,
    That round and round still turns with onward might,
    Stern, dragging thousands to the dreaded night
    Of an unknown hereafter.
  • Hours are Time's shafts, and one comes winged with death.
    • On the clock at Keir House, near Denblane, the Seat of Sir William Stirling Maxwell
  • Sex horas somno, totidem des legibus æquis
    Quatuor orabis, des epulisque duas;
    Quod superest ultra sacris largire Camœnis.
    Six hours in sleep, in law's grave study six,
    Four spend in prayer, the rest on nature fix.
    • Edward Coke introduced this as "ancient verses" in Institutes of the Laws of England, Book II, Chapter I. Section 85. See also Gilbert's Law of Evidence. (1784). "Sex horis dormire sat est juvenique senique: / Septem vix pigro; nulli concedimus octo." Six hours in sleep is enough for youth and age. Perhaps seven for the lazy, but we allow eight to no one. Version from Collectio Salernitans. Ed. De Renzi, Volume II, line 130
  • Time means a lot to me because, you see, I, too, am also a learner and am often lost in the joy of forever developing and simplifying. If you love life, don't waste time, for time is what life is made up of.
    • Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 10; Here Lee paraphrases a much older English proverb: If you care for life, don't waste your time; for time is what life is made of. (as quoted in Bordighera and the Western Riviera (1883) by Frederick Fitzroy Hamilton, p. 189)
  • Touch us gently, Time!
    Let us glide adown thy stream
    Gently,—as we sometimes glide
    Through a quiet dream!
  • Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise,
    He who defers this work from day to day,
    Does on a river's bank expecting stay,
    Till the whole stream, which stopped him, should be gone,
    That runs, and as it runs, for ever will run on.
    • Abraham Cowley, The Danger of Procrastination, translation of Horace. 1, Epistle II. 4
  • Nothing is there to come, and nothing past,
    But an eternal Now does always last.
  • His time's forever, everywhere his place.
  • Time, as he passes us, has a dove's wing,
    Unsoil'd, and swift, and of a silken sound.
  • See Time has touched me gently in his race,
    And left no odious furrows in my face.
    • George Crabbe, Tales of the Hall (1819), Book XVII. The Widow, Stanza 3
  • Swift speedy Time, feathered with flying hours,
    Dissolves the beauty of the fairest brow.
  • Che'l perder tempo a chi più sa più spiace.
    The wisest are the most annoyed at the loss of time.
  • 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.
  • But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day and the race a life.
  • Time, to the nation as to the individual, is nothing absolute; its duration depends on the rate of thought and feeling.
  • When Time shall turne those Amber Lockes to Gray.
  • Happy the man, and happy he alone,
    He who can call today his own;
    He who, secure within, can say,
    Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today.
    • John Dryden, Imitation of Horace (1685), Book III, Ode 29 line 65-68
  • (Time) with his silent sickle.
  • And write whatever Time shall bring to pass
    With pens of adamant on plates of brass.
  • Who well lives, long lives: for this age of ours
    Should not be numbered by years, daies and hours.
  • Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.
  • Dilatio damnum habet, mora periculum.
    Procrastination brings loss, delay danger.
  • The four eights, that ideal of operative felicity, are here (New Zealand) a realized fact.
    • J. A. Froude, Oceana, Chapter XIV. The four eights are explained in a footnote to be "Eight to work, eight to play, eight to sleep, and eight shillings a day"
  • I count my time by times that I meet thee;
    These are my yesterdays, my morrows, noons,
    And nights, these are my old moons and my new moons.
    Slow fly the hours, fast the hours flee,
    If thou art far from or art near to me:
    If thou art far, the bird's tunes are no tunes;
    If thou art near, the wintry days are Junes.
  • Ein stiller Geist ist Jahre lang geschäftig;
    Die Zeit nur macht die feine Gährung kräftig.
    Long is the calm brain active in creation;
    Time only strengthens the fine fermentation.
  • Mein Vermächtniss, wie herrlich weit und breit;
    Die Zeit ist mein Vermächtniss, mein Acker ist die Zeit.
    My inheritance, how wide and fair
    Time is my estate; to Time I'm heir.
    • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Travels. Translation by Carlyle in Sartor Resartus. "My inheritance how lordly wide and fair; / Time is my fair seed-field, to Time I'm heir." Carlyle's version in Chartism, Chapter X. "Mein Erbteil wie herrlich, weit und breit; / Die Zeit ist mein Besitz, mein Acker ist die Zeit." Goethe—Westöstliche Divan, VI. Buch der Sprüche. (Original version)
  • Rich with the spoils of time.
  • I made a posy while the day ran by;
    Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie
    My life within this band.
    But time did beckon to the flowers, and they
    By noon most cunningly did steal away,
    * And wither'd in my hand.
  • Thus times do shift; each thing his turne does hold;
    New things succeed, as former things grow old.
  • Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
    Old Time is still a flying,
    And this same flower that smiles to-day,
    To-morrow will be dying.
  • But what says the Greek? "In the morning of life, work; in the midday, give counsel; in the evening, pray."
  • Dum loquimur, fugerit invida
    Ætas: carpe diem.
    While we are speaking envious time will have fled. Seize the present day.
    • Horace, Carmina, Book I. 11. 7
  • Carpe diem, quam minime credula postero.
    Enjoy the present day, trusting very little to the morrow.
    • Horace, Carmina, Book I. 11. 8
  • Eheu fugaces Postume, Postume,
    Labuntur anni, nec pietas moram
    Rugis et instanti senectæ
    Afferet, indomitæ que morti.
    Postumus, Postumus, the years glide by us:
    Alas! no piety delays the wrinkles,
    Nor the indomitable hand of Death.
    • Horace, Carmina, Book II. 14. 1
  • Damnosa quid non imminuit dies?
    What does not destructive time destroy?
    • Horace, Carmina, Book III. 6. 45
  • Quidquid sub terra est, in apricum proferet ætas;
    Defodiet condetque nitentia.
    Time will bring to light whatever is hidden; it will cover up and conceal what is now shining in splendor.
  • Singula de nobis anni prædantur euntes.
    Each passing year robs us of some possession.
  • Horæ
    Memento cita mors venit, aut victoria læta.
    In the hour's short space comes swift death, or joyful victory.
  • How short our happy days appear!
    How long the sorrowful!
  • To the true teacher, time's hour-glass should still run gold-dust.
  • And panting Time toil'd after him in vain.
  • Seven hours to law, to soothing slumber seven,
    Ten to the world allot, and all to heaven.
    • Sir William Jones, Ode in Imitation of Alcæus. See Lord Teignmouth, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Sir William Jones. Letter to Charles Chapman. Aug. 30, 1784. Also Errata, p. 251. "The muses claim the rest," or "the muse claims all beside" are the changes made by Jones, according to Andrew Amos, Four Lectures on the Advantages of a Classical Education, London, 1846, p. 78
  • That old bald cheater, Time.
  • The noiseless foot of Tune steals swiftly by
    And ere we dream of manhood, age is nigh.
    • Juvenal, Satires (early 2nd century), IX. 129. Gifford's translation
  • Time, that aged nurse
    Rocked me to patience.
  • Time's waters will not ebb nor stay.
    • John Keble, Christian Year. First Sunday after Christmas
  • Memento semper finis, et quia perditum non redit tempus.
    Remember always your end, and that lost time does not return.
  • Time, which strengthens Friendship, weakens Love.
  • Vingt siècles descendus dans l'éternelle nuit.
    Y sont sans mouvement, sans lumière et sans bruit.
  • Twenty ages sunk in eternal night. They are without movement, without light, and without noise.
    • Lemoine, Œuvres Poétiques, Saint Louis
  • Potius sero quam nunquam.
    Better late than never.
    • Livy, IV, II. 11. Bunyan—Pilgrim's Progress, Part I. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, IX. 9. Matthew Henry—Commentaries. Matthew XXI. Murphy—School for Guardians, Act I. Tusser—Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry. An Habitation enforced
  • 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.
  • Alas! it is not till Time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life to light the fires of human passion with, from day to day, that man begins to see that the leaves which remain are few in number.
  • A handful of red sand from the hot clime
    Of Arab deserts brought,
    Within this glass becomes the spy of Time,
    The minister of Thought.
  • What we want, we have for our pains
    The promise that if we but wait
    Till the want has burned out of our brains,
    Every means shall be present to state;
    While we send for the napkin the soup gets cold,
    While the bonnet is trimming the face grows old,
    When we've matched our buttons the pattern is sold,
    And everything comes too late—too late.
  • Volat hora per orbem.
    The hours fly around in a circle.
  • Æquo stat fœdare tempus.
    Time stands with impartial law.
  • But at my back I always hear
    Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near.
  • Such phantom blossoms palely shining
    Over the lifeless boughs of Time.
  • Time is a feathered thing,
    And, whilst I praise
    The sparkling of thy looks, and call them rays,
    Takes wing,
    Leaving behind him as he flies
    An unperceivèd dimness in thine eyes.
  • However we pass Time, he passes still,
    Passing away whatever the pastime,
    And, whether we use him well or ill,
    Some day he gives us the slip for the last time.
  • Who can undo
    What time hath done? Who can win back the wind?
    Reckon lost music from a broken lute?
    Renew the redness of a last year's rose?
    Or dig the sunken sunset from the deep?
    • Owen Meredith, Orval, or the Fool of Time, Second Epoch, scene 1. Said to be a translation of a French translation of The Inferno. See Saturday Review (27 February 1869)
  • When time is flown, how it fled
    It is better neither to ask nor tell,
    Leave the dead moments to bury their dead.
    • Owen Meredith (Lord Lytton), Wanderer, Book IV. Two out of the Crowd, Stanza 17
  • Time, eftsoon will tumble
    All of us together like leaves in a gust,
    Humbled indeed down into the dust.
  • Time will run back and fetch the age of gold.
  • Le temps … souverain médecin de nos passions.
    Time is the sovereign physician of our passions.
  • Time softly there
    Laughs through the abyss of radiance with the gods.
  • A wonderful stream is the river of Time
    As it runs through the realms of tears,
    With a faultless rhythm and musical rhyme,
    And a broader sweep and a surge sublime,
    And blends with the ocean of years.
    • Appeared in Moore's Rural New Yorker (May 31, 1856), probably from Whyte Melville's Uncle John
  • Time, still as he flies, adds increase to her truth,
    And gives to her mind what he steals from her youth.
  • For each age is a dream that is dying,
    Or one that is coming to birth.
  • Labitur occulte, fallitque volubilis ætas,
    Ut celer admissis labitur amnis aquis.
    Time steals on and escapes us, like the swift river that glides on with rapid stream.
    • Ovid, Amorum (16 BC), I. 8. 49
  • Dum loquor hora fugit.
    While I am speaking the hour flies.
    • Ovid, Amorum (16 BC), Book I. 11. 15
  • Tempore difficiles veniunt ad aratra juvenci;
    Tempore lenta pati frena docentur equi.
    In time the unmanageable young oxen come to the plough; in time the horses are taught to endure the restraining bit.
    • Ovid, Ars Amatoria, Book I. 471
  • Nec, quæ præteriit, iterum revocabitur unda:
    Nec, quæ præteriit, hora redire potest.
    Neither will the wave which has passed be called back; nor can the hour which has gone by return.
    • Ovid, Ars Amatoria, Book III. 63
  • Ludit in humanis divina potentia rebus,
    Et certam præsens vix habet hora fidem.
    Heaven makes sport of human affairs, and the present hour gives no sure promise of the next.
    • Ovid, Epistolæ Ex Ponto, IV. 3. 49
  • Tempora labuntur, tacitisque senescimus annis;
    Et fugiunt fræno non remorante dies.
    Time glides by, and we grow old with the silent years; and the days flee away with no restraining curb.
    • Ovid, Fasti, VI. 771
  • Assiduo labuntur tempora motu,
    Non secus ad flumen. Neque enim consistere flumen.
    Nec levis hora potest.
    Time glides by with constant movement, not unlike a stream. For neither can a stream stay its course, nor can the fleeting hour.
    • Ovid, Metamorphoses, XV. 180
  • Tempus edax rerum.
    Time that devours all things.
    • Ovid, Metamorphoses, XV. 234
  • Temporis ars medicina fere est.
    Time is generally the best medicine.
    • Ovid, Remedia Amoris. 131
  • These are the times that try men's souls.
  • Let time that makes you homely, make you sage.
  • Time, the foe of man's dominion,
    Wheels around in ceaseless flight,
    Scattering from his hoary pinion
    Shades of everlasting night.
  • The present is our own; but while we speak,
    We cease from its possession, and resign
    The stage we tread on, to another race,
    As vain, and gay, and mortal as ourselves.
  • Man yields to death; and man's sublimest works
    Must yield at length to Time.
  • Time is lord of thee:
    Thy wealth, thy glory, and thy name are his.
  • His golden locks Time hath to silver turned,
    O time too swift! O swiftness never ceasing!
    His youth 'gainst Time and Age hath ever spurned,
    But spurned in vain! Youth waneth by increasing.
    • George Peele, Sonnet, Polyhymnia. Another version published in Seger's Honor Military and Civil (1602)
  • Tanto brevius omne, quanto felicius tempus.
    The happier the time, the quicker it passes.
  • From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime
    Out of Space—out of Time.
  • Time conquers all, and we must time obey.
  • Gone! gone forever!—like a rushing wave
    Another year has burst upon the shore
    Of earthly being—and its last low tones,
    Wandering in broken accents in the air,
    Are dying to an echo.
  • Expect, but fear not, Death: Death cannot kill,
    Till Time (that first must seal his patent) will.
    Would'st thou live long? keep Time in high esteem:
    Whom gone, if thou canst not recall, redeem.
  • Dum deliberamus quando incipiendum sit, incipiere jam serum est.
    Whilst we deliberate how to begin a thing, it grows too late to begin it.
  • He briskly and cheerfully asked him how a man should kill time.
  • E'en such is time! which takes in trust
    Our youth, our joys, and all we have;
    And pays us naught but age and dust,
    Which, in the dark and silent grave,
    When we have wandered all our ways,
    Shuts up the story of our days.
    And from which grave, and earth, and dust,
    The Lord will raise me up, I trust.
    • Sir Walter Raleigh. Written in his Bible. Cayley's Life of Raleigh, Volume II, Chapter IX
  • Hour after hour departs,
    Recklessly flying;
    The golden time of our hearts
    Is fast a-dying:
    O, how soon it will have faded!
    Joy droops, with forehead shaded;
    And Memory starts.
  • Time, like a flurry of wild rain,
    Shall drift across the darkened pane!
  • To vanish in the chinks that Time has made.
  • Que pour les malheureux l'heure lentement fuit!
    How slowly the hours pass to the unhappy.
  • Tag wird es auf die dickste Nacht, und, kommt
    Die Zeit, so reifen auch die spät'sten Früchte.
    Day follows on the murkiest night, and, when the time comes, the latest fruits will ripen.
  • O, wer weiss
    Was in der Zeiten Hintergrunde schlummert.
    Who knows what may be slumbering in the background of time!
  • Time flies on restless pinions—constant never.
    Be constant—and thou chainest time forever.
  • Spät kommt ihr—doch ihr kommt!
    You come late, yet you come!
  • Dreifach ist der Schritt der Zeit:
    Zögernd kommt die Zukunft hergezogen,
    Pfeilschnell ist das Jetzt entflogen,
    Ewig still steht die Vergangenheit.
    Threefold the stride of Time, from first to last:
    Loitering slow, the Future creepeth—
    Arrow-swift, the Present sweepeth—
    And motionless forever stands the Past.
  • Doch zittre vor der langsamen,
    Der stillen Macht der Zeit.
    Yet tremble at the slow, silent power of time.
  • Upon my lips the breath of song,
    Within my heart a rhyme,
    Howe'er time trips or lags along,
    I keep abreast with time!
  • Time rolls his ceaseless course.
  • Infinita est velocitas temporis quæ magis apparet respicientibus.
    The swiftness of time is infinite, which is still more evident to those who look back upon the past.
  • Volat ambiguis
    Mobilis alis hora.
    The swift hour flies on double wings.
  • Nullum ad nocendum tempus angustum est malis.
    No time is too short for the wicked to injure their neighbors.
  • Yet, do thy worst, old Time; despite thy wrong,
    My love shall in my verse ever live young.
  • Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
    And delves the parallels in beauty's brow.
  • O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
    Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
    When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
    Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?
    O fearful meditation! where, alack,
    Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?
    Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
    Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
  • The flood of time is rolling on;
    We stand upon its brink, whilst they are gone
    To glide in peace down death's mysterious stream.
    Have ye done well?
  • Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years,
    Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
    Are brackish with the salt of human tears!
    Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow
    Claspest the limits of mortality!
    And sick of prey, yet howling on for more,
    Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore,
    Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm,
    Who shall put forth on thee,
    Unfathomable sea?
  • Per varios præceps casus rota volvitur ævi.
    • The wheel of time rolls downward through various changes.
    • Silius Italicus, Punica, VI. 121
  • For time would, with us, 'stead of sand,
    Put filings of steel in his glass,
    To dry up the blots of his hand,
    And spangle life's page as they pass.
    Since all flesh is grass ere 'tis hay,
    O may I in clover lie snug,
    And when old Time mow me away,
    Be stacked with defunct Lady Mugg!
    • Horace and James Smith, Rejected Addresses, The Beautiful Incendiary, by the Hon. W. S. 10
  • For the next inn he spurs amain,
    In haste alights, and skuds away,
    But time and tide for no man stay.
  • Time wears all his locks before,
    Take thou hold upon his forehead;
    When he flies he turns no more,
    And behind his scalp is naked.
    Works adjourn'd have many stays,
    Long demurs breed new delays.
  • Goe to my Love where she is carelesse layd
    Yet in her winter's bowere not well awake;
    Tell her the joyous time will not be staid
    Unlesse she doe him by the forelock take.
  • Gather the rose of love whilst yet is time.
  • Too late I staid, forgive the crime,
    Unheeded flew the hours;
    How noiseless falls the foot of Time
    That only treads on flow'rs!
    What eye with clear account remarks
    The ebbing of his glass,
    When all its sands are diamond sparks
    That dazzle as they pass?
    Ah! who to sober measurement
    Time's happy swiftness brings,
    When birds of Paradise have lent
    Their plumage for his wings?
  • I see that time divided is never long, and that regularity abridges all things.
  • In time take time while time doth last, for time
    Is no time when time is past.
    • Written on the title page of Manuscript account book of Nicholas Stone, mason to James I. In the Soane Museum
  • Ever eating, never cloying,
    All-devouring, all-destroying,
    Never finding full repast,
    Till I eat the world at last.
  • Lauriger Horatius
    Quam dixisti verum;
    Fugit euro citius
    Tempus edax rerum.
    • Laurel crowned Horatius
      True, how true thy saying,
      Swift as wind flies over us
      Time devouring, slaying.
    • Anon. Translation by John Addington Symonds
  • A wonderful stream is the River Time,
    As it runs through the realms of Tears,
    With a faultless rhythm, and a musical rhyme,
    And a broader sweep, and a surge sublime
    As it blends with the ocean of Years.
  • He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend:
    Eternity mourns that. 'Tis an ill cure
    For life's worst ills to have no time to feel them.
  • Come, Time, and teach me many years,
    I do not suffer in dream;
    For now so strange do these things seem,
    Mine eyes have leisure for their tears.
  • Every moment dies a man,
    Every moment one is born.
    • Alfred Tennyson, Vision of Sin, Stanza 9. ("Minute" for "moment" in early Ed.) "Every minute dies a man, / And one and one-sixteenth is born." Parody on Tennyson by a Statistician

  • I am any man's suitor,
    If any will be my tutor:
    Some say this life is pleasant,
    Some think it speedeth fast,
    In time there is no present,
    In eternity no future,
    In eternity no past.

    We laugh, we cry, we are born, we die.
    Who will riddle me the how and the why?

  • Heu! universum triduum!
    • Alas! three whole days to wait!
    • Terence, Works, II. 1. 17. (Sometimes "totum" given for "universum")
  • I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds;
    Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
    From the hid battlements of Eternity;
    Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
    Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again.
  • Once in Persia reigned a king
    Who upon his signet ring
    Graved a maxim true and wise,
    Which if held before the eyes
    Gave him counsel at a glance
    Fit for every change and chance.
    Solemn words, and these are they:
    "Even this shall pass away."
  • Time tries the troth in everything.
    • Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandrie, The Author's Epistle, Chapter I
  • The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd,
    Lets in new light through chinks that Time has made.
  • To wind the mighty secrets of the past,
    And turn the key of time.
  • And let its meaning permeate
    Whatever comes, This too shall pass away.
  • He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.
  • Our time is a very shadow that passeth away.
    • Wisdom of Solomon, II. 5
  • Therefore fear not to assay
    To gather, ye that may,
    The flower that this day
    Is fresher than the next.
  • In records that defy the tooth of time.

See also

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