Archive

Quotes

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

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

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

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BC

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, 1911

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

Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.

—James Joyce, 1922

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

—Book of Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BC

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

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

—Marguerite Duras, 1987

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

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

—Jane Austen, 1814

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