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.
—Joseph Addison, 1711Quotes
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.
—Book of Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BCI’ve been on a calendar, but never on time.
—Marilyn Monroe, 1962Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.
—Jean de La Bruyère, 1688This is Year Zero.
—Pol Pot, 1975Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.
—Simone Weil, 1947My 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, 1844The best way to fill time is to waste it.
—Marguerite Duras, 1987Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
—Frank Zappa, 1989Years 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, 1911Time, 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, 1905Nothing puzzles me more than time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them.
—Charles Lamb, 1810The celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork.
—Johannes Kepler, 1605