quotations about time
Time matters because we are finite, because time is the medium in which we live our lives.
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life
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
The Paris Review, spring 1956
We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.
JOHN F. KENNEDY
Address to the National Association of Manufacturers in New York City, December 5, 1961
When things don't please you, the best medicine is to swallow a little tincture of time.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Man seems to be deficient in nothing so much as he is in time.
ZENO
attributed, Day's Collacon
Time loves a new lay; and the dirge he is playing
Will change for you soon to a livelier strain.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"You Will Forget Me"
Time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
The fluid cradle of events (time).
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
Time cannot be spurred on like a horse.
KOBO ABE
The Woman in the Dunes
Our time's the most precious thing we've got to offer folks, and the worst thing a body can do is to take it away from us.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Saxophone Joe and the Woman in Black", The Ivory and the Horn
You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
T. S. ELIOT
"The Dry Salvages", Four Quartets
A clock is a little machine that shuts us out from the wonder of time.
SUSAN GLASPELL
"Tickless Time"
Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence -- neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish -- it is an imponderably valuable gift.
MAYA ANGELOU
Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now
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", Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings
And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
MILAN KUNDERA
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The most difficult thing about Time, I have learned, is doing it.
ROGER ZELAZNY
The Guns of Avalon
Time can also be a place.... Everything depends on where you are standing, on where you look or what you hear. The measure of it is found in consciousness itself.
FRANK HERBERT
God Emperor of Dune
He who toys with Time, trifles with a frozen serpent, which afterwards turns upon the hand that indulged the sport, and inflicts a deadly wound.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Time is the chrysalis of eternity.
RICHTER
attributed, Day's Collacon