The past is always tense and the future, perfect.

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.