quotations about time
Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury
Time is a seedfield; in youth we sow it with causes; in after life we reap the harvest of effects.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
O aching time! O moments big as years!
JOHN KEATS
"Hyperion: A Fragment"
Anesthetized time; nothing moves and everything is at once.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
Time, so complain'd of,
Who to no one man
Shows partiality,
Brings round to all men
Some undimm'd hours.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Consolation"
My father Time is weak and gray
With waiting for a better day;
See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
The Mask of Anarchy
Love and Time with reverence use,
Treat them like a parting friend:
Nor the golden gifts refuse
Which in youth sincere they send:
For each year their price is more,
And they less simple than before.
JOHN DRYDEN
Tyrannic Love
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
T. S. ELIOT
"Burnt Norton", Four Quartets
Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
interview, Words with Writers, December 5, 2011
Time ... advances like the slowest tide, but retreats like the swiftest torrent.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
One must work with time and not against it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
It rolls in grandeur lone--
The stream of Time;
And on its shores lie strown
The wrecks of every clime.
HARVEY RICE
"The Stream of Time"
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives,
Who thinks most, feels noblest, acts the best
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Festus
Time means less than the color of zero.
RAVEN GREGORY
Alice in Wonderland, issue #1, January 2012
Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Theses on the Philosophy of History
Time is the longest distance between two places.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
The Glass Menagerie
We do live and breathe,
And we are gone. The spoiler heeds us not.
We have our spring-time and our rottenness;
And as we fall, another race succeeds.
To perish likewise--Meanwhile Nature smiles--
The seasons run their round--The Sun fulfils
His annual course--and heaven and earth remain
Still changing, yet unchanged--still doom'd to feel
Endless mutation in perpetual rest.
Where are concealed the days which have elapsed?
Hid in the mighty cavern of THE PAST,
They rise upon us only to appal,
By indistinct and half-glimpsed images,
Misty, gigantic, huge, obscure, remote.
HENRY KIRKE WHITE
"Time", The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White
Time is the root of all this earth;
These creatures, who from Time had birth,
Within his bosom at the end
Shall sleep; Time hath nor enemy nor friend.
BHARTRHARI
"Time"
Time is the father of mutability.
SOLON
attributed, Day's Collacon