Thou art not to learn the humors and tricks of that old bald cheater, time.
—Ben Jonson, 1601Quotes
Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.
—James Joyce, 1922They 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.
—The Qur’an, c. 620This is Year Zero.
—Pol Pot, 1975If 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.
—Aristotle, c. 330 BCI’ve been on a calendar, but never on time.
—Marilyn Monroe, 1962A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.
—Jane Austen, 1814We 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, 1847In time history must become a fairy tale—it will become again what it was in the beginning.
—Novalis, c. 1798My 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, 1844Time, 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, 1905The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
—John Berger, 1984We 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, 1711