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

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.

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

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.

Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

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

There is no work of human hands which time does not wear away and reduce to dust.

The past is always tense and the future, perfect.

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

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

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 best way to fill time is to waste it.

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