quotations about time
Time: the whisper beneath that word is death.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
For time to pass means for events to be linearly ordered, by earlier and later. The causal structure of the world depends on its temporal structure. The present state of the universe produces the successive states. To understand the later states, you look at the earlier states and not the other way around. Of course, the later states can give you all kinds of information about the earlier states, and, from the later states and the laws of physics, you can infer the earlier states. But you normally wouldn't say that the later states explain the earlier states. The direction of causation is also the direction of explanation.
TIM MAUDLIN
"A Defense of the Reality of Time", Quanta Magazine, May 16, 2017
What's that as flies without wings, your ladyship? Time! Time!
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
The days are such a repetition of each other that they sometimes seem very long, but when one pauses and looks back one starts at the accumulation of departed time, and deplores the swiftness of the seasons.
ROBERT GRANT
"The Romance of a Soul"
Onward and sublime
Will ever glide
The silent stream of Time,
That bears us on its tide.
HARVEY RICE
"The Stream of Time"
Time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
Science and Human Values
Time overlaps itself. A breath breathed from a passing breeze is not the whole wind, neither is it just the last of what has passed and the first of what will come, but is more--let me see--more like a single point plucked on a single strand of a vast spider web of winds, setting the whole scene atingle. That way; it overlaps ... as prehistoric ferns grow from bathtub planters.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
Normal people experience time as a flow, an infinite cascade of falling dominos, a chain of cause-and-effect events that neither leaps forward several moments nor suddenly reverses, but rather passes with the predictable click-click-click of now moments falling into the next with a steady cadence.
DEREK THOMPSON
"A Brief Economic History of Time", The Atlantic, December 21, 2016
The past was a jigsaw puzzle and you never had all the pieces.
GREGORY BENFORD
Artifact
Time ripens the substance of a life as the seasons mellow and perfect its fruits. The best apples fall latest and keep longest.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
Time is a limited commodity and each of us has 24 hours per day. Once you invest that time, it is irretrievable.
SUSAN MURPHY
"'No' Is A Complete Sentence", Forbes, February 20, 2017
Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Time will unfold its leaves.
GLEN COOK
Warlock
Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases.
STEPHEN HAWKING
A Brief History of Time
Time passed slowly, like and old man climbing a hill.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Lord of Light
When I was a child, I thought the pageant of the past was still intact and traveling in space at 186,282 miles per second, aboard a science-fiction beam of light under the command of Captain Clock. Not yet having learned how to count time as money, I know the beam of light is time shaped by the force of the human imagination and the powers of its expression (in the languages of art and science but not as the commodity discounted as an abstraction), and I'm content to live temporarily suspended in as many kinds and sorts of time (historical, biological, metaphysical, and mythological) as were my pagan forebears long since descended into the glossy darkness under the turf at Stonehenge.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Captain Clock", Lapham's Quarterly: Time
Time matters because we are finite, because time is the medium in which we live our lives.
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life
Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was -- only is.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Paris Review, spring 1956
Time is a treasure to the industrious, a burden to the indolent.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
There are no moments you have frozen in amber. It's moving, it's changing, so appreciate what's good about right now and be ready for what's next.
MICHAEL J. FOX
interview, Good Housekeeping, April 2009