The celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork.
—Johannes Kepler, 1605Quotes
Time is a veil interposed between God and ourselves, as our eyelid is between our eye and the light.
—François-René de Chateaubriand, c. 1820We 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, 1847Nothing puzzles me more than time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them.
—Charles Lamb, 1810My 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, 1844In time history must become a fairy tale—it will become again what it was in the beginning.
—Novalis, c. 1798Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
—Frank Zappa, 1989Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
—Tennessee Williams, 1951They 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. 620I’ve been on a calendar, but never on time.
—Marilyn Monroe, 1962No 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, 1706Do not lessen the time of following desire, for the wasting of time is an abomination to the spirit.
—Ptahhotep, c. 2350 BCIf 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