Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.