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, 1951Quotes
Time is a veil interposed between God and ourselves, as our eyelid is between our eye and the light.
—François-René de Chateaubriand, c. 1820There is no work of human hands which time does not wear away and reduce to dust.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BCTime’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.
—Simone Weil, 1947Do not lessen the time of following desire, for the wasting of time is an abomination to the spirit.
—Ptahhotep, c. 2350 BCThe appointed thing comes at the appointed time in the appointed way.
—Myrtle Reed, 1910Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
—Cormac McCarthy, 1992Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.
—Book of Wisdom, c. 100 BCIn time history must become a fairy tale—it will become again what it was in the beginning.
—Novalis, c. 1798The celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork.
—Johannes Kepler, 1605My 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, 1844A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.
—Jane Austen, 1814Time, 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, 1905