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.
Remember always your end, and that lost time does not return.
I’ve climbed up here
holding the hilt of time’s sword
after driving it
into my tender heart.
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
The past and future are veiled; but the past wears the widow's veil; the future, the virgin's.
Time softly there
Laughs through the abyss of radiance with the gods.
Oh seize the instant time; you never will
With waters once passed by impel the mill.
Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away.
Heaven makes sport of human affairs, and the present hour gives no sure promise of the next.