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.

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

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

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

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!

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

Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

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

This is Year Zero.

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

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

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

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