Years are nothing to me—they should be nothing to you. Who asked you to count them or to consider them? In the world of wild nature, time is measured by seasons only—the bird does not know how old it is—the rose tree does not count its birthdays!

I look for the end of the future, but it never ceases to arrive. 

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

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

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

Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

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.

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

If both what is before and what is after are in this same “now,” things which happened ten thousand years ago would be simultaneous with what has happened today, and nothing would be before or after anything else.

Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.

We wish away whole years, and travel through time as through a country filled with many wild and empty wastes, which we would fain hurry over, that we may arrive at those several little settlements or imaginary points of rest which are dispersed up and down in it.

They say, “We only have the life of this world. We die and we live, and nothing destroys us but time.” Yet, not true knowledge have they of this—only belief.

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.