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

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.

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

Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

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!

Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.

Nothing puzzles me more than time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them.

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.

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.

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