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!

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

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.

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

Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.

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.

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

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

Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

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

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

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

I’ve been on a calendar, but never on time.