Quotes About Time

Youth is a wonderful thing what a crime to waste it on children.

Like to an hermit poor in place obscure,I mean to spend my days of endless doubt,To wail such woes as time cannot recure,Where none but Love shall ever find me out.

[History] hath triumphed over time, which besides it nothing but eternity hath triumphed over.

Even such is time, that takes in trustOur youth, our joys, our all we have,And pays us but with age and dust;Who in the dark and silent grave,When we have wandered all our ways,Shuts up the story of our days.And from which earth, and grave, and dust,The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.

And come he slow, or come he fast, It is but death who comes at last.

Our time is like our money; when we change a guinea the shillings escape as things of small account; when we break a day by idleness in the morning, the rest of the hours lose their importance in our eyes.

To be always intending to live a new life, but never find time to set about it - this is as if a man should put off eating and drinking from one day to another till he be starved and destroyed.

Each age has deemed the new-born year The fittest time for festal cheer.

Time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.

The tree (of Islam) is of artificial planting. Instead of containing within itself the germ of growth and adaptation to the various requirements of time and clime and circumstance, expanding with the genial sunshine and rain from heaven, it remains the same forced and stunted thing as when first planted some twelve centuries ago.

True stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

Forgetting," I said, "is probably as much a part of life as remembering. We're all amnesiacs.

Six months isn't such a long time. That's how long it's been since I came to see you in May, but the fact is it's been much longer than that. We've spent years living inside each other.

No existe el futuro sin el pasado, porque lo que va a suceder no se puede imaginar más como una forma de repetición.

Infancy is irretrievable. Its memories live underground. To what extent they return by stealth or are triggered by various catalysts remains an ongoing question.

In a way," I said to him, "that now you're talking about hardly exists. We feel it, but it's impossible to measure. The past is always eating up the present.

El tiempo no es algo externo a nosotros, vive en nuestro interior. Sólo nosotros vivimos el pasado, presente y futuro, y el presente es demasiado efímero para que seamos plenamente conscientes de él; sólo después lo recordamos y entonces lo hacemos de forma codificada, si no se disuelve en la amnesia.

that 'now' you're talking about hardly exists. We feel it, but it's impossible to measure. The past is always eating up the present." I stroked his hair and paused. "I think I've always loved paintings for that reason. Somebody makes a canvas in time, but after it's made, a painting stays in the present.

It appears that time has turned that young woman, who imagined herself a romantic heroine, into something of a comic character, but I remain fond of her. We are relatives, after all.

The rhythm that allows no change, no difference, is one that seeks to stop time, and stopping time means death. The teacher has lost the possibility of an ongoing story because he is trapped in the trauma of a single moment and is never released.

Like everyone, Bill rewrote his life. The recollections of an older man are different from those of a young man. What seemed vital at forty might lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past.

We need to think of the self as a continuum, a steady story over time. The mind is always searching for similarities, associations, repetitions, because they create meaning.

Ideas become part of our perceptions, but we are not always conscious of them. The story of art is continually being revised by art movements, by money and collectors, by "definitive" museum shows, by new concerns, discoveries, and ideologies that alter the telling of the past. Every story yokes together disparate elements in time, and every story, by its very nature, leaps over a lot.