The past is always tense and the future, perfect.

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!

This is Year Zero.

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

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

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

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.

No 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.

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

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

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

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.