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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

This is Year Zero.

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

My stern chase after time is, to borrow a simile from Tom Paine, like the race of a man with a wooden leg after a horse.