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 BCQuotes
The appointed thing comes at the appointed time in the appointed way.
—Myrtle Reed, 1910Do not lessen the time of following desire, for the wasting of time is an abomination to the spirit.
—Ptahhotep, c. 2350 BCWe 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, 1711I look for the end of the future, but it never ceases to arrive.
—Zhuangzi, c. 325 BCThe best way to fill time is to waste it.
—Marguerite Duras, 1987There is no work of human hands which time does not wear away and reduce to dust.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BCWe 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, 1847Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.
—Simone Weil, 1947Nothing puzzles me more than time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them.
—Charles Lamb, 1810For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.
—Book of Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BCNo 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, 1706The past is always tense and the future, perfect.
—Zadie Smith, 2000