Archive

Quotes

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

—Marilyn Monroe, 1962

This is Year Zero.

—Pol Pot, 1975

The past is always tense and the future, perfect.

—Zadie Smith, 2000

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

—Zhuangzi, c. 325 BC

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

—Ben Jonson, 1601

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

Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

—Book of Wisdom, c. 100 BC

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

—Cormac McCarthy, 1992

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.

—Karl Marx, 1847

If both what is before and what is after are in this same “now,” things which happened ten thousand years ago would be simultaneous with what has happened today, and nothing would be before or after anything else.

—Aristotle, c. 330 BC

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!

—Marie Corelli, 1911

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

Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.

—James Joyce, 1922