Quotes About Time

Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.

Our life is frittered away by detail.

We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course.

There is no life but this.

This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it

Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time.

I don't want to feel as if my life were a sojourn any longer. That philosophy cannot be true which so paints it. It is time now that I begin to live.

Warum leben wir in solcher Hast, mit solcher Vergeudung von Leben? Wir glauben, Hungers zu sterben, bevor wir hungrig sind. Es heißt, ein Stich zur rechten Zeit erspart neun andere - also werden lieber gleich tausend Stiche gemacht, um neun für den nächsten Tag zu ersparen.

The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times

That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. All memorable events ... transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say All intelligences awake in the morning. Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. Walden

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands.

This man is still a fisher, and belongs to an era in which I myself have lived. Perchance he is not confounded by many knowledges, and has not sought out many inventions, but how to take many fishes before the sun sets, with slender birchen pole and flaxen line, that is invention enough for him.

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

I stopped short in the path today to admire how the trees grow up without forethought regardless of the time and circumstances. They do not wait as men do—now is the golden age of the sapling—Earth, air, sun, and rain, are occasion enough.

En tuant le temps on blesse l'éternité.

The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure. There will be a wide margin for relaxation to his day. He is only earnest to secure the kernels of time, and does not exaggerate the value of the husk. Why should the hen set all day? She can lay but one egg, and besides she will not have picked up materials for a new one. Those who work much do not work hard.

As yesterday and the historical ages are past, as the work of today is present, so some flitting perspectives and demi-experiences of the life that is in nature are in time veritably future, or rather outside to time, perennial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die.

Not that the story need to be long, but it will take a long time to shorten it

As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man's life will be gone. I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.

La vie est trop courte pour qu'on soit pressé.

There's no new news, just old news with new dates

Our thoughts are the epochs in our lives, all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here.

Chi non crede che ogni giorno contiene un'ora più mattutina, più sacra e più rosea di quelle che finora ha profanato, ha perduto ogni speranza della vita e segue un cammino che lo porta sempre più in basso.