A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.

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.

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

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

We 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.

Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

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.

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

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

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

The past is always tense and the future, perfect.

Years are nothing to me—they should be nothing to you. Who asked you to count them or to consider them? In the world of wild nature, time is measured by seasons only—the bird does not know how old it is—the rose tree does not count its birthdays!

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