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

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

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

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.