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!

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

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

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

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

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.

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.

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

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

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

Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.

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