Archive

Quotes

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

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BC

The appointed thing comes at the appointed time in the appointed way.

—Myrtle Reed, 1910

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.

—Aristotle, c. 330 BC

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

—John Berger, 1984

Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.

—James Joyce, 1922

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

—Jean de La Bruyère, 1688

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

—Cormac McCarthy, 1992

The past is always tense and the future, perfect.

—Zadie Smith, 2000

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

—Novalis, c. 1798

Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

—Book of Wisdom, c. 100 BC

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

—Frank Zappa, 1989

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

—Johannes Kepler, 1605

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.

—The Qur’an, c. 620