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Quotes

Thou art not to learn the humors and tricks of that old bald cheater, time.

—Ben Jonson, 1601

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

—Johannes Kepler, 1605

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

—Cormac McCarthy, 1992

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

This is Year Zero.

—Pol Pot, 1975

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.

—Karl Marx, 1847

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

—John Berger, 1984

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

—Novalis, c. 1798

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

—Zhuangzi, c. 325 BC

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

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BC

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

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

—Ptahhotep, c. 2350 BC