Time is a veil interposed between God and ourselves, as our eyelid is between our eye and the light.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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!