Archive

Quotes

Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.

—Tennessee Williams, 1951

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

—Cormac McCarthy, 1992

The appointed thing comes at the appointed time in the appointed way.

—Myrtle Reed, 1910

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

—Book of Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BC

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

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

—Jean de La Bruyère, 1688

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

—Jane Austen, 1814

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.

—John Quincy Adams, 1844

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

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

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 Qur’an, c. 620

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

—Simone Weil, 1947

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

—Ptahhotep, c. 2350 BC