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Quotes

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

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BC

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 Qur’an, c. 620

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

—Charles Lamb, 1810

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

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

—Jane Austen, 1814

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

—Novalis, c. 1798

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

—Myrtle Reed, 1910

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

—Zhuangzi, c. 325 BC

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

—John Berger, 1984

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

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

—Cormac McCarthy, 1992

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

—Book of Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BC