Time Quotes
The sourced entries here are an odd mix: Edmund Burke on planning the future by the past (1791), Rollo May on learning to live in the present (1953), and a line about death from Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) that turns up on several pages because it fits more than one. Shakespeare leads the page by a wide margin, with T. S. Eliot a distant second.
“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana” is credited to Groucho Marx almost everywhere and is flagged. No citation to Marx has been found. It first appears in the mid-1960s, unattributed, in logic and computing texts, as an example of why machines find ordinary sentences hard to parse.
Time, eftsoon will tumble
All of us together like leaves in a gust,
Humbled indeed down into the dust.
Time is lord of thee:
Thy wealth, thy glory, and thy name are his.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow.
Therefore fear not to assay
To gather, ye that may,
The flower that this day
Is fresher than the next.
That vast, beneficent Eternity
Where all things lovely pass to when they die.
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.
Now Mercy says, speaking from her silence, stand in the sun. Breath the deep. Feel what can be!
Years following years steal something ev'ry day.
At last they steal us from ourselves away.