Quotes About Time

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering?

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

To stand on the meeting of two eternities; the past and future

Twelve times did the iron register of time beat on the sonorous bell-metal, summoning the ghosts to rise, and walk their nightly round. - In plainer language, it was twelve o'clock...

It had, indeed, in a superlative degree, the two principal ingredients which serve to recommend all great and noble designs of this nature; for it required an immoderate expense to execute, and a vast length of time to bring it to any sort of perfection.

travels as slowly through centuries of monkish dulness, when the world seems to have been asleep

Time, however, the best physician of the mind

To these encroachments, time and ignorance, the two great supporters of imposture, gave authority;

Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore.

Time changes us all, and happy that change where justice, truth, and love which can know no change grow in beauty with the passing years.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

It was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all the while he had waited the wait was itself his portion.

Besides, he was a philosopher; he smoked a good many cigars over his disappointment, and in the fulness of time he got used to it.

Anger does not last, that way, for years. But there are other things. Impressions last, when they have been strong.

It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness—that hush in which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the spring of a beast.

The finer natures were those that shone at the larger times.

From five o'clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure.

The years have touched her only to enrich her; the flower of her youth had not faded; it only hung more quietly on its stem.

Life is all a green old English garden and time an endless summer afternoon.

It is as difficult to suppose a person intending to write a modern English, as to suppose him writing an ancient English, novel; that is a label which begs the question. One writes the novel, one paints the picture, of one's language and of one's time, and calling it modern English will not, alas! make the difficult task any easier.

Wasn't history full of the destruction of precious things?

I don't think I can attempt to say now what it was. Some day—perhaps.