Archive

Quotes

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

—Cormac McCarthy, 1992

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

—Jean de La Bruyère, 1688

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

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

Thou art not to learn the humors and tricks of that old bald cheater, time.

—Ben Jonson, 1601

Time is a veil interposed between God and ourselves, as our eyelid is between our eye and the light.

—François-René de Chateaubriand, c. 1820

Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

—Book of Wisdom, c. 100 BC

Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.

—James Joyce, 1922

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

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.

—Karl Marx, 1847

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

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

—Jane Austen, 1814

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 BC