Archive

Quotes

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

—Simone Weil, 1947

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

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

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

—Cormac McCarthy, 1992

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

—Ptahhotep, c. 2350 BC

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

—Marguerite Duras, 1987

No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.

—Jonathan Swift, 1706

This is Year Zero.

—Pol Pot, 1975

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

Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

—Book of Wisdom, c. 100 BC

Time, 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

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

—Marilyn Monroe, 1962