quotations about time
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
Time commences with mutable things; if they perish, it perishes with them.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
That was the truly horrifying thing about it: the sense of time as an enemy, to be fought tooth and nail--but there was so much of it; you killed an hour, but what good did that do when there were thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions more hours just waiting to take its place?
K. J. PARKER
The Escapement
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
Time is only an illusion produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal duration, and it does not exist where no consciousness exists in which the illusion can be produced; but "lies asleep."
HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY
An Abridgement of the Secret Doctrine
There is nothing fatherly about time and what it does to us, either.
DEAN KOONTZ
Forever Odd
Time seemed wormholed and faulted, honeycombed in mazes that crossed and recrossed.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night
When then time is passing, it may be perceived and measured; but when it is past, it cannot, because it is not.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
Time, that aged nurse,
Rocked me to patience.
JOHN KEATS
Endymion
We are all burning in time, but each is consumed
at his own speed.
JACK GILBERT
"Burning (Andante Non Troppo)"
Time's flying wheel leaves little trace behind.
ISAAC MCLELLAN
"Musings"
The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.
HORACE
Epistles
Time goes, you say? ah no! Alas, time stays, we go.
GREGORY BENFORD
Furious Gulf
Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away, but which nevertheless will make at the end of it, no small deduction from the life of man.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Countess Cathleen
I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me.
J. M. COETZEE
In the Heart of the Country
Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Troilus and Cressida
But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Fellowship of the Ring