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Quotes

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

—Frank Zappa, 1989

Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.

—James Joyce, 1922

The past is always tense and the future, perfect.

—Zadie Smith, 2000

I’ve been on a calendar, but never on time.

—Marilyn Monroe, 1962

Thou art not to learn the humors and tricks of that old bald cheater, time.

—Ben Jonson, 1601

No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.

—Jonathan Swift, 1706

In time history must become a fairy tale—it will become again what it was in the beginning.

—Novalis, c. 1798

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

—Marguerite Duras, 1987

Time is a veil interposed between God and ourselves, as our eyelid is between our eye and the light.

—François-René de Chateaubriand, c. 1820

A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.

—Jane Austen, 1814

Time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters, but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.

—Edith Wharton, 1905

 Do not lessen the time of following desire, for the wasting of time is an abomination to the spirit.

—Ptahhotep, c. 2350 BC

We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at most, time’s carcass.

—Karl Marx, 1847