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.

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

Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.

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.

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

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!

Time is a veil interposed between God and ourselves, as our eyelid is between our eye and the light.

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

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

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

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.

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

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.