quotations about time
How do you "spend" your time? Because make no mistake, time is a currency. There is a cost to how you spend it. The cost might be a trade-off, like choosing one activity over another, but don't fool yourself into thinking that this is a free exchange.
CARL RICHARDS
"Free Time? Not Likely, for Time Is Anything but Free", New York Times, January 18, 2017
Days, months, years fly away, and irrecoverably sink in the abyss of time.
JEAN DE LA BRUYERE
attributed, Thoughts Moral and Divine
Ah! let us love, my Love, for Time is heartless,
Be happy while you may!
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"The Lake"
Time will discover everything to posterity; it is a babbler, and speaks even when no question is put.
EURIPIDES
attributed, Day's Collacon
Time is the chrysalis of eternity.
RICHTER
attributed, Day's Collacon
Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but it is noble to live life, and without time there is no life. Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
Man seems to be deficient in nothing so much as he is in time.
ZENO
attributed, Day's Collacon
By the 1930s, wristwatches were the norm and the pocket watch was an anachronism. Time, itself, had become a human appendage.
DEREK THOMPSON
"A Brief Economic History of Time", The Atlantic, December 21, 2016
But to say there was a time when time was not, is as absurd as to say there was a man when there was no man.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
Time seemed wormholed and faulted, honeycombed in mazes that crossed and recrossed.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night
Time is but the ante-chamber to eternity.
SUSANNAH MOODIE
Mark Hurdlestone; Or, The Two Brothers
Time is a trust, and for every minute of it you will have to account.
JOHN LUBBOCK
The Use of Life
Time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place, we advance, stop and retreat according to his orders, our mistake lies in imagining that we can catch him out.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
The Cave
Time goes, you say? ah no! Alas, time stays, we go.
GREGORY BENFORD
Furious Gulf
Time commences with mutable things; if they perish, it perishes with them.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Time ... antiquates antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
Pseudodoxia Epidemica: Or Enquiries Into Very Many Received Tenents
No preacher is listened to but time; which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have tried in vain to put into our heads.
JONATHAN SWIFT
"Thoughts on Various Subjects", The Works of Jonathan Swift
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Richard II
I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.
JULIAN BARNES
The Sense of an Ending
As we speak cruel time is fleeing. Seize the day, believing as little as possible in tomorrow.
HORACE
Odes