Quotes on time
Time is a brisk wind, for each hour it brings something new... but who can understand and measure its sharp breath, its mystery and its design?
Paracelsus
There are whole years for which I hope I'll never be cross-examined, for I could not give an alibi.
McLaughlin, Mignon
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
Thoreau, Henry David
Time is the only thief we can't get justice against.
Alauda, Astrid
Nothing is worth more than this day.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Why won't they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can't they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping - rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year's and Easter and Christmas - But, goodness, why need they do it?
Passos, John Dos
No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
Wilde, Oscar
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.
Adams, Douglas
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.
Augustine, Saint
Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving.
Amis, Martin
A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.
Priestly, John B.
Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once.
Allen, Woody
It has been left to our generation to discover that you can move heaven and earth to save five minutes and then not have the faintest idea what to do with them when you have saved them.
Joad, C.E.M.
Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.
Boucicault, Dion
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
Sandburg, Carl
Watches are so named as a reminder. If you don't watch carefully what you do with your time, it will slip away from you.
Sirtors, Drew
The Past is the textbook of tyrants; the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.
Melville, Herman
Time, the cradle of hope. Wisdom walks before it, opportunity with it, and repentance behind it; he that has made it his friend will have little to fear from his enemies, but he that has made it his enemy will have little to hope from his friends.
Colton, Charles Caleb
Sadness flies away on the wings of time.
Fontaine, Jean de La
Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.
Wheeler, John Archibald
But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.
Disraeli, Benjamin
God made time, but man made haste.
Proverb, Irish
You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.
Barrie, James Matthew
Time is the fire in which we burn.
Schwartz, Delmore
Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past even while we attempt to define it, and, like the flash of lightning, at once exists and expires.
Colton, Charles Caleb
The time you think you're missing, misses you too.
Delecto, Ymber
Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo