But thoughts the slave of life, and life, Time’s fool, And Time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop.
— King Henry IV, Part 1
Quotes About Time
A kettle hisses on the stove and you glance at the clock, then glance again forty seconds later, as if staring will speed the boil. That small impatience is the ordinary face of time, measured in minutes and lost in hours. Kennedy says that change is the law of life, and those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future. Van Gogh writes that it is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning. Twain notes the appalling value of an hour and thought he could never waste one again without remorse and terror.
Mandela asks to spend time while still in good health, with his family, his friends, and also with himself, a quiet request that treats time as something to gather before it runs out. Kafka suggests that if you have food in your jaws you have solved all questions for the time being, a comic reminder that the near present can blot out everything else. The clock keeps moving either way. The question is what you do with the minutes between the hiss and the pour.
Mandela asks to spend time while still in good health, with his family, his friends, and also with himself, a quiet request that treats time as something to gather before it runs out. Kafka suggests that if you have food in your jaws you have solved all questions for the time being, a comic reminder that the near present can blot out everything else. The clock keeps moving either way. The question is what you do with the minutes between the hiss and the pour.
Time is a waste of money.
— Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.
— Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden
It gave an appalling idea of the value of an hour, and I thought I could never waste one again without remorse and terror.
— The Mysterious Stranger
First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
— Mrs. Dalloway
Every moment has its pleasures and its hope.
— Mansfield Park
…everyone needs a somewhere, a place he can go. There comes a time, you see, inevitably there comes a time you have to have a somewhere you can go!
— Crime and Punishment
The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.
— War and Peace
This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel; Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, And beats high mountain down.
— The Hobbit
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.
— In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.
— Letters of Thomas Jefferson
Lost Time is never found again.
— Poor Richard's Almanack
The longer the time that has elapsed, the more things fall into proportion. One sees them in their true relationship to one another.
— The Mysterious Mr. Quin
Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.
— Speeches And Letters Of Abraham Lincoln, 1832 1865
Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past.
— Four Quartets
If the whole world I once could see / On free soil stand, with the people free / Then to the moment might I say, Linger awhile. . .so fair thou art.
— Faust: First Part
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
— Counsels and Maxims
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
— The Little Prince
An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.
— Madame Bovary
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
— The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Men spend their time in following a ball or a hare it is the pleasure even of kings.
— Pensées
All those minds that are interested in finding out the truth communicate with each other across the distances of space and time. I, too, was taking part in the effort which humanity makes to know.
— Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Flesh is willing, but the Soul requiresSisyphean patience for its song, Time, Hippocrates remarked, is shortand Art is long.
— Les Fleurs Du Mal
The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.
— Gulliver's Travels