Lapham’s Quarterly

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

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

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

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

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

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

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

Time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters, but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.

Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.

Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.

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

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

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.

No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.

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.

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

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

Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

The past is always tense and the future, perfect.

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!

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

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

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.

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

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

 Do not lessen the time of following desire, for the wasting of time is an abomination to the spirit.

We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at most, time’s carcass.

This is Year Zero.

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

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