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.

Time, 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.

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

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

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.

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

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!

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

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

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

If 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.

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

Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.