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Quotes

 Do not lessen the time of following desire, for the wasting of time is an abomination to the spirit.

—Ptahhotep, c. 2350 BC

No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.

—Jonathan Swift, 1706

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

—Cormac McCarthy, 1992

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

—Book of Ecclesiastes, c. 250 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

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

—Zhuangzi, c. 325 BC

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

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BC

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

—Johannes Kepler, 1605

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

—John Berger, 1984

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

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

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

—Marilyn Monroe, 1962

The past is always tense and the future, perfect.

—Zadie Smith, 2000