quotations about time
Go to the man on the street and ask whether time has a direction, whether the future is different from the past, and whether time doesn't march on toward the future. That's the natural view. The more interesting view is how the physicists manage to convince themselves that time doesn't have a direction.
TIM MAUDLIN
"A Defense of the Reality of Time", Quanta Magazine, May 16, 2017
By the 1930s, wristwatches were the norm and the pocket watch was an anachronism. Time, itself, had become a human appendage.
DEREK THOMPSON
"A Brief Economic History of Time", The Atlantic, December 21, 2016
Time is but a phantom dagger
That motion lifts to slay itself.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
"Advice To a Pool"
The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Countess Cathleen
The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
Many & most moments go by with us hardly aware of their passage. But love & hate & fear cause time to snag you, to drag you down like a spider's web holding fast to a doomed fly's wings. And when you're caught like that you're aware of every moment & movement & nuance.
WALTER MOSLEY
When the Thrill Is Gone
Indifferent to the affairs of men, time runs out, precise, heedless, exact, and immutable in rhythm.
ERWIN SYLVANUS
Dr. Korczak and the Children
I believe in the force of time, the impetus of that dimension that seems to have baffled even the physicists, the power of that force that will, in time, cure every ill, solve every problem, fulfill every nightmare. Time. I see time all about me, like a substance. I see it in the clutter of my apartment, in the fabric of the city, in the lessons that I teach. The tyranny of time, as dictatorial as any god.
SIMON MAWER
The Gospel of Judas
Time is getting on.... Yes, bad luck to it. It always gallops when you want it to walk, and walks when you want it to gallop, like an ill-trained horse.
ROBERT BARR
The Victors
Time commences with mutable things; if they perish, it perishes with them.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Time, for a man who has never truly felt a second of it, is not a great sacrifice.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
Time will discover everything to posterity; it is a babbler, and speaks even when no question is put.
EURIPIDES
attributed, Day's Collacon
Time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place, we advance, stop and retreat according to his orders, our mistake lies in imagining that we can catch him out.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
The Cave
The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Conquest of Happiness
He who toys with Time, trifles with a frozen serpent, which afterwards turns upon the hand that indulged the sport, and inflicts a deadly wound.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Time is only an illusion produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal duration, and it does not exist where no consciousness exists in which the illusion can be produced; but "lies asleep."
HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY
An Abridgement of the Secret Doctrine
Time begets more than fiction can create.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Time ... thou ceaseless lackey to eternity.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Rape of Lucrece
That was the truly horrifying thing about it: the sense of time as an enemy, to be fought tooth and nail--but there was so much of it; you killed an hour, but what good did that do when there were thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions more hours just waiting to take its place?
K. J. PARKER
The Escapement
We are all burning in time, but each is consumed
at his own speed.
JACK GILBERT
"Burning (Andante Non Troppo)"