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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.

Random quote on Time

Most quoted on time:

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

Naomi Shihab Nye Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems (2020)

Procrastination is the thief of time:
Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
And to the mercies of a moment leaves
The vast concerns of an eternal scene.

Edward Young

We push time from us, and we wish him back;
* * * * * *
Life we think long and short; death seek and shun.

Edward Young

Old Time, that greatest and longest established spinner of all!… his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his Hands are mutes.

Charles Dickens

Thus times do shift; each thing his turne does hold;
New things succeed, as former things grow old.

Robert Herrick

The noiseless foot of Tune steals swiftly by
And ere we dream of manhood, age is nigh.

Juvenal

For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

Arthur O'Shaughnessy

Yet, do thy worst, old Time; despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.

William Shakespeare

Ever eating, never cloying,
All-devouring, all-destroying,
Never finding full repast,
Till I eat the world at last.

Jonathan Swift

How can I tell that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?

Douglas Adams The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)

We remain
Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past.

James Russell Lowell

Liberty and Union (United States), now and forever, one and inseparable.

Daniel Webster

I was not singing erewhile for you to follow, to understand — nor am I now…

Walt Whitman

Time means a lot to me because, you see, I, too, am also a learner and am often lost in the joy of forever developing and simplifying. If you love life, don't waste time, for time is what life is made up of.

Bruce Lee Striking Thoughts (2000)

New times demand new measures and new men;
The world advances, and in time outgrows
The laws which in our father's times were best;
And doubtless, after us, some purer scheme
Will be shaped out by wiser men than we,
Made wiser by the steady growth of truth.

James Russell Lowell Poems (1844)

Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
Do not be forever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust:
Thou know'st tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.

William Shakespeare

Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.

Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Time is at once an agony of the Present, a long torment of the Past and the terrible prospect of countless Futures. Time is also a complex of subtly intersecting realities, of unguessable consequences and undiscoverable causes, of profound tensions and dependencies.

Michael Moorcock The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

Eternity invests every state, whether of bliss or of suffering, with a mysterious and awful importance, entirely its own. It gives that weight and moment to whatever it attaches, compared to which all interests that know a period fade into absolute insignificance.

Robert Hall Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

If we consider eternity, into that time never entered; eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is as a short parenthesis in a long period; and eternity had been the same as it is, though time had never been.

John Donne

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