quotations about time
I think we are what Time may make us--lords
Of wealth and land, or wagemen held at hire;
Turning the years, we gain our toil's desire,
Or lose, inopportune, its high rewards.
KENNETH RAND
"To the Time-God"
Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion.
ECKHART TOLLE
The Power of Now
Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
interview, Words with Writers, December 5, 2011
Nothing is more precious than time, and those who misspend it are the greatest of all prodigals.
THEOPHRASTUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
We're sitting here and time is going on, and we know what it means to say that time is going on. I don't know what it means to say that time really doesn't pass and it's only in virtue of entropy increasing that it seems to.
TIM MAUDLIN
"A Defense of the Reality of Time", Quanta Magazine, May 16, 2017
They that drive away time spur a free horse.
JOHN MASON
Select Sentences
Sometimes a minute can be a mighty powerful thing.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
People resemble still more the time in which they live, than they resemble their fathers.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
ROBERT FROST
"Acquainted with the Night"
Love and Time with reverence use,
Treat them like a parting friend:
Nor the golden gifts refuse
Which in youth sincere they send:
For each year their price is more,
And they less simple than before.
JOHN DRYDEN
Tyrannic Love
Let every man be master of his time.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Macbeth
It rolls in grandeur lone--
The stream of Time;
And on its shores lie strown
The wrecks of every clime.
HARVEY RICE
"The Stream of Time"
Time wounds all heals.
TRACY LETTS
August: Osage County
Time is the backdrop of our lives and the very fabric of the cosmos.
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life
Time is a keyhole.... We sometimes bend and peer through it. And the wind we feel on our cheeks when we do--the wind that blows through the keyhole--is the breath of all the living universe.
STEPHEN KING
The Wind through the Keyhole
The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Theses on the Philosophy of History
Time was like someone alongside me who could be unpredictable, could nudge me into something stupid.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
The universe may be timeless, but if you imagine breaking it into pieces, some of the pieces can serve as clocks for the others. Time emerges from timelessness. We perceive time because we are, by our very nature, one of those pieces.
CRAIG CALLENDER
Scientific American, June 2010
Some nights--more than I like, lately--I wake to the sound of the bedside clock. The room is dark, without detail, and it expands in such a way that it seems as if I'm outdoors, under an empty sky, or underground, in a cavern. I might be falling through space. I might be dreaming. I could be dead. Only the clock moves, its tick steady, unhurried. At these moments I have the most chilling understanding that time moves in only one direction.
ALAN BURDICK
"The Secret Life of Time", The New Yorker, December 19, 2016
Previously, Newton considered time to be moving like a straight arrow which unerringly flies forward toward its target. Nothing could deflect or change the course of this arrow once it was shot. Einstein, however, showed that time was more like a mighty river, moving forward but often meandering through twisting valleys and plains. The presence of matter or energy might momentarily shift the direction of the river, but overall the river's course was smooth: It never abruptly ended or jerked backward. However, Gödel showed that the river of time could be smoothly bent backward into a circle. Rivers, after all, have eddy currents and whirlpools. In the main, a river may flow forward, but at the edges there are always side pools where water flows in a circular motion.
MICHIO KAKU
Hyperspace