Archive

Quotes

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

—Marguerite Duras, 1987

Nothing puzzles me more than time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them.

—Charles Lamb, 1810

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

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BC

Thou art not to learn the humors and tricks of that old bald cheater, time.

—Ben Jonson, 1601

Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

—Book of Wisdom, c. 100 BC

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

—Jane Austen, 1814

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!

—Marie Corelli, 1911

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

—François-René de Chateaubriand, c. 1820

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

—Myrtle Reed, 1910

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

—Book of Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BC

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

Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.

—James Joyce, 1922

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

—Tennessee Williams, 1951