Archive

Quotes

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

—Jane Austen, 1814

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

—Marguerite Duras, 1987

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

—Simone Weil, 1947

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

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BC

My 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, 1844

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

—Cormac McCarthy, 1992

The past is always tense and the future, perfect.

—Zadie Smith, 2000

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

—Tennessee Williams, 1951

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

—Book of Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BC

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

—François-René de Chateaubriand, c. 1820

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

—Marilyn Monroe, 1962

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

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

—Novalis, c. 1798