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Quotes

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

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

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

—Marguerite Duras, 1987

The celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork.

—Johannes Kepler, 1605

My stern chase after time is, to borrow a simile from Tom Paine, like the race of a man with a wooden leg after a horse.

—John Quincy Adams, 1844

The appointed thing comes at the appointed time in the appointed way.

—Myrtle Reed, 1910

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!

—Marie Corelli, 1911

There is no work of human hands which time does not wear away and reduce to dust.

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BC

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

—Ptahhotep, c. 2350 BC

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

—Jane Austen, 1814

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 BC

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

—Novalis, c. 1798

Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.

—James Joyce, 1922