Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.

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

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.

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