Archive

Quotes

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

—Frank Zappa, 1989

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

—Novalis, c. 1798

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

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

—Simone Weil, 1947

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

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

—Marilyn Monroe, 1962

Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.

—James Joyce, 1922

They 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

The past is always tense and the future, perfect.

—Zadie Smith, 2000

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.

—Jean de La Bruyère, 1688

Nothing puzzles me more than time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them.

—Charles Lamb, 1810

We 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

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

—Zhuangzi, c. 325 BC