Lapham’s Quarterly

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

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.

Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

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

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

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.

Thou art not to learn the humors and tricks of that old bald cheater, time.

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.

Nothing puzzles me more than time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them.

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

Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.

Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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!

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.

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

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

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

This is Year Zero.

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 is always tense and the future, perfect.

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

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.