quotations about time
One hurries through, even though there's time; the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the glowing mouth in the side of the ship; the dim, turbulent alley is too confusedly the present.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Tender Is the Night
Men have contrived instruments to measure the motion of time, but they have no scales to weigh, no figures to compute, no words to describe its value.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
Time cleanses what it touches over time.
AESCHYLUS
Eumenides
He began to suspect another, deeper layer of time, a time of stone and cloud and tree to which the time of clocks and calendars was a gross mockery cobbled up by savages.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night
I don't suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You don't have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury
Make good use of Time ... reflect that yesterday cannot be recalled, tomorrow cannot be assured, today is only yours, which if you procrastinate you lose.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
One day you will hear the sound of time rustling as it slips through your fingers like sand.
SERGEI LUKYANENKO
Night Watch
Time treads down empires.
DUGALD MOORE
"To the Moon"
Only time conquers time and its burdens.
DEAN KOONTZ
Brother Odd
So little time we live in Time,
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour's term
To practice for Eternity.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
"Bearded Oaks"
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
"A New Refutation of Time", Other Inquisitions
Even such is time, that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
lines written the night before his death
Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?
SAMUEL BECKETT
Waiting for Godot
The end of time is the birthday of Eternity.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
O time, arrest your flight! and you, propitious hours, arrest your course! Let us savor the fleeting delights of our most beautiful days!
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"The Lake"
Pass on, ever on, O Time! ush'ring in
New joys, new aspirations, and new life.
WATIE W. SWANZY
"Time"
All substances the cunning chemist Time
Melts down into that liquor of my life.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Day's Ration
Every hour in itself, as it respects us in particular, is the only one we can call our own.
JEAN DE LA BRUYERE
attributed, Thoughts Moral and Divine
Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat--especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to August Derleth, November 21, 1930
How quickly the time goes as the season advances, the earth hurtling along its groove into the years's sharply descending final arc.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea