I look for the end of the future, but it never ceases to arrive.
—Zhuangzi, c. 325 BCQuotes
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!
—Marie Corelli, 1911For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.
—Book of Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BCI’ve been on a calendar, but never on time.
—Marilyn Monroe, 1962In time history must become a fairy tale—it will become again what it was in the beginning.
—Novalis, c. 1798If 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 BCOur allotted time is the passing of a shadow.
—Book of Wisdom, c. 100 BCDo not lessen the time of following desire, for the wasting of time is an abomination to the spirit.
—Ptahhotep, c. 2350 BCThe best way to fill time is to waste it.
—Marguerite Duras, 1987We 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, 1711Time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters, but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.
—Edith Wharton, 1905Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
—Cormac McCarthy, 1992The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
—John Berger, 1984