Archive

Quotes

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

—Simone Weil, 1947

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 look for the end of the future, but it never ceases to arrive. 

—Zhuangzi, c. 325 BC

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

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

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BC

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

—Cormac McCarthy, 1992

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

—Book of Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BC

 Do not lessen the time of following desire, for the wasting of time is an abomination to the spirit.

—Ptahhotep, c. 2350 BC

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

—Johannes Kepler, 1605

Thou art not to learn the humors and tricks of that old bald cheater, time.

—Ben Jonson, 1601

The past is always tense and the future, perfect.

—Zadie Smith, 2000

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

—John Berger, 1984

This is Year Zero.

—Pol Pot, 1975