quotations about time
Time's chariot-wheels make their ruts in the fairest face.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Time is just common, it's like water for a fish. Everybody's in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. That's all. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn't care.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
Man's most prudent counselor is time.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus
The long unmeasured pulse of time moves everything. There is nothing hidden that it cannot bring to light, nothing once known that may not become unknown. Nothing is impossible.
SOPHOCLES
Ajax
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
Time is the great physician.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Endymion
Change of days
To us is sensible; and each revolve
Of the recording sun conducts us on
Farther in life, and nearer to our goal
Not so with Time--mysterious chronicler,
He knoweth not mutation--centuries
Are to his being as a day, and days
As centuries--Time past, and Time to come
Are always equal: when the world began
God had existed from eternity.
HENRY KIRKE WHITE
"Time", The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY
The Little Prince
Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Nothing keeps. There is one law in the universe: NOW.
ALFRED SUTRO
The Open Door
One day some as yet unborn scholar will recognize in the clock the machine that has tamed the wilds.
J. M. COETZEE
In the Heart of the Country
Time eases all things.
SOPHOCLES
Oedipus Rex
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'.
BOB DYLAN
The Times They Are A-Changin'
Time is a train
Makes the future the past
Leaves you standing in the station
Your face pressed up against the glass
U2
"Zoo Station"
Time is a face on the water.
STEPHEN KING
Wolves of the Calla
Time! Joyless emblem of the greed
Of millions, robber of the best
Which earth can give ...
AMY LOWELL
"New York at Night"
Time, you'll be pleased to know--and since one must start somewhere--was created in creation. The question What was there before creation? is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.
GLEN DUNCAN
I, Lucifer
One of the best gifts my parents gave us was not only this awareness of time but what they did with that time. And having that awareness of time is a very special kind of perspective. It shapes my every day.
NANCY BOROWICK
"The gift of time: Life before death", CNN, May 14, 2017
The wings of Time are black and white,
Pied with morning and with night.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Compensation
Time is not a thing that passes ... it's a sea on which you float.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood