Skip to content

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:

There comes some time an end to all things, to the good and to the bad.

Alec Waugh The Loom of Youth (1917)

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

Friedrich Schlegel

"I wish life was not so short," he thought. "Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about."

J. R. R. Tolkien

Given enough time humans will screw up Wikipedia just as they have screwed up everything else, but so far it's not too bad.

Jimmy Wales

Time stretches like a lazy leopard when it wants to.

Stephen Baxter Vacuum Diagrams (1997)

It is vain futility to analyze the algebra of time.

Dejan Stojanovic The Creator (2000)

In our time the science of Sufism is desolate.

Ali Hujwiri The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004)

Knowledge, surely, is always of time, whereas knowing is not of time. Knowledge is from a source, from accumulation, from conclusion, while knowing is a movement.

Bruce Lee Striking Thoughts (2000)

The best time to write a story is yesterday. The next best time is today.

R. A. Lafferty It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs (1995)

Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.

Malcolm X Malcolm X Speaks (1965)

To say, therefore, that thought cannot happen in an instant, but requires a time, is but another way of saying that every thought must be interpreted in another, or that all thought is in signs.

Charles Sanders Peirce Collected Papers (1931)

I was too busy doing my job and living my life to spend time keeping notes for some future volume of memoirs.

Pierre Trudeau Memoirs (1993)

We moved toward that precipice with a motion as inexorable as that with which time takes us toward our death.

Samuel R. Delany Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

The time for war has not yet come, but it will come and that soon; and when it does come my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.

Stonewall Jackson

Each time dawn appears, the mystery is there in its entirety.

René Daumal

It seems that I have spent my entire time trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.

A. J. Ayer

Get it wrong, and we call it a cult. Get it right, in the right time and the right place, and maybe, for the next few millennia, people won't have to go to work on your birthday.

Robert Sapolsky

For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

Marshall McLuhan The Mechanical Bride (1951)

I can feel a something pounding in my brain
Just any time that someone speaks your name
Trumpets sound and I hear thunder boom
Every time that you walk in the room.

Jackie DeShannon When You Walk In The Room (1962)

I wish to fall ill that all my time may pass in seclusion with the Lord and be saved appearing in mass prayers.

Al-Fudayl ibn 'Iyad The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004)

Related topics