Quotes About Time

Time is the longest distance between two places.—TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, THE GLASS MENAGERIE (1944)

Perfection is the child of time.—BISHOP JOSEPH HALL, WORKS

went live on the air in Burbank at 11:30 p.m. Pacific Time, it was 2:30

appointed vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, calculated that God made the world on October 23, 4004 BC, but he was able to further refine Ussher's arithmetic, proving that God got started at exactly 9:00 that morning, presumably after His breakfast.

To cross the southern coast of England, west to east, is thus to travel forwards - and at breathtaking chronological speed - in a self-propelled time-machine. With every few hundred yards of eastward progress one passes through hundreds of thousands of years of geological time: a million years of history goes by with every couple of miles march.

My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.

She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.

Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me

My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together.

I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.

It is dreadful to think that behind me my own past is no longer anything but shifting darkness.

There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.

Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.

The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present.

One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.

Je crois que je comprends bien comment ca peut te faire. Nous avons essayée de batir notre amour par-delà les instants, mais seuls les instants sont surs. Pour le reste on a besoin de foi; et la foi, est-ce courage ou paresse?

I went to get a detective story. You have to kill time. But time will kill me too - and there´s the true, preestablished balance.

Has my watch stopped? No. But its hands do not seem to be going around. Don't look at them. Think of something else - anything else: think of yesterday, a calm, ordinary, easy-flowing day, in spite of the nervous tension of waiting.

Some men, instead of building their existence upon the indefinite unfolding of time, propose to assert it in its eternal aspect & to achieve it as an absolute. They hope, thereby, to surmount the ambiguity of their condition. Thus, many intellectuals seek their salvation in either in critical thought or creative activity.

All those minds that are interested in finding out the truth communicate with each other across the distances of space and time. I, too, was taking part in the effort which humanity makes to know.

The world brings itself into being before my eyes in an everlasting present: I grow used to its different aspects so quickly that it does not seem to me to change.

Du jour où il nait, l'homme commence à mourir; c'est la vérité qu'incarne la Mère.

For twenty years it seemed to me that I had been taking part in a game, and that one day, at the stroke of midnight, I would return to the land of shadows. ...In a little while, the hands would be pointing to midnight; they would point to midnight tomorrow and the next day, and I would still be here.