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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

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 rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.

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.