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.