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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The past is always tense and the future, perfect.

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

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.

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!

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