Quotes About Time

If, as we grow older, we scrutinize our own past at the expense of 'problems', it is simply because we handle memories more readily than ideas.

The more injured you are by time, the more you seek to escape it.

Un livre est un suicide différé.

L'heure du crime ne sonne pas en même temps pour tous les peuples. Ainsi s'explique la permanence de l'histoire.

Toda participación en las agitaciones temporales es tiempo perdido y malgasto inútil. […]

A patrimony all our own: the hours when we have done nothing. . . . It is they that form us, that individualize us, that make us dissimilar.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity...

A man who has completely vanquished selfishness, who retains no trace of it whatever, cannot live longer than twenty-one days

Old age is nature's self-criticism.

Anyone may now and then have the sense of occupying only a point and a moment; to have such a sense day and night, hour by hour, is less frequent, and it is from this experience, this datum, that one turns toward nirvana or sarcasm--or toward both at once.

Each of us takes on himself that unit of disaster which is the phenomenon man. And the only meaning time has is to multiply these units, endlessly to enlarge these vertical sufferings which depend upon a nonentity of matter, upon the pride of a given name, and upon a solitude without appeal.

We have always been dying, and yet death has lost none of its freshness, its originality. Herein lies the secret of secrets.

It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

It's all the way it's always been and probably always will be until there's nothing left any more.

A poor wretch who feels time, who is its victim, its martyr, who experiences nothing else, who is time at each moment, knows what a metaphysician or a poet divines only by grace of a collapse or a miracle.

It's already in the past," he says about all he achieves, even as he achieves it, thereby forever destitute of the present.

Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us.

With sufficient perspective, nothing is good or bad. The historian who ventures to judge the past is writing journalism in another century.

our past so quickly stops being "ours" and turns into history, something which no longer concerns anyone.

Mine still, this moment passes by, escapes me, and is buried forever. Am I going to commit myself with the next? I make up my mind: it is here, it belongs to me — and already is long since past. From morning to night, fabricating the past!

Gli uomini soffrono dell'avvenire, si precipitano nella vita, fuggono nel tempo, cercano. E niente mi fa più male dei loro occhi indagatori, vani, e tuttavia privi di vanità.

El aburrimiento es el eco en nosotros del tiempo que se desgarra…, la revelación del vacío, el cese de ese delirio que sostiene —o inventa— la vida…