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.
—Aristotle, c. 330 BCQuotes
A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.
—Jane Austen, 1814Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.
—Book of Wisdom, c. 100 BCThe past is always tense and the future, perfect.
—Zadie Smith, 2000This is Year Zero.
—Pol Pot, 1975We 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.
—Joseph Addison, 1711Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.
—James Joyce, 1922Time is a veil interposed between God and ourselves, as our eyelid is between our eye and the light.
—François-René de Chateaubriand, c. 1820The celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork.
—Johannes Kepler, 1605The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
—John Berger, 1984Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
—Frank Zappa, 1989I’ve been on a calendar, but never on time.
—Marilyn Monroe, 1962There is no work of human hands which time does not wear away and reduce to dust.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BC