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, 1844Quotes
Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.
—Book of Wisdom, c. 100 BCA watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.
—Jane Austen, 1814Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
—Frank Zappa, 1989We 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, 1711Time is a veil interposed between God and ourselves, as our eyelid is between our eye and the light.
—François-René de Chateaubriand, c. 1820The celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork.
—Johannes Kepler, 1605Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.
—James Joyce, 1922Nothing puzzles me more than time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them.
—Charles Lamb, 1810Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
—Cormac McCarthy, 1992Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.
—Jean de La Bruyère, 1688The past is always tense and the future, perfect.
—Zadie Smith, 2000They 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. 620