Quotes About Time

Wisdom has reference only to the past. The future remains for ever an infinite field for mistakes. You can't know beforehand.

A Prelude, 1907 Lessford's Rabbits, 1908

But how could she know what she would feel next year? How could one ever know? How could one say Yes? for years and years? The little yes, gone on a breath! Why should one be pinned down by that butterfly word? Of course it had to flutter away and be gone, to be followed by other yes's and no's! Like the straying of butterflies.

Beings, things, and events do not exist in time: being, things, and events are times.

From the nature of reality in our life experience at the present time, we say these sliding doors are new, or the ceiling is old. We imagine that this ceiling was made several decades or several centuries ago because of its present nature of appearing old. Yet in reality, only the present exists. The past and the future do not exist [separate from the present].

If you want to take care of tomorrow, take better care of today. We always live now. All we have to do is entrust ourselves to the life we now live.

Life and death occur in a moment. In other words, life and death are nothing but moment. You don't believe that your life is a moment, because in everyday life you always have lots of choices. But if you see death, you taste it immediately. Moment and you come together, creating the momentum energy of time, and you and death become one; you have no choice.

This is why everyday life—daily routine—is very important for us. It can let us be free from time.

You are connected with all beings in time, which permeates into every inch of the cosmic universe, and space, where everyone and everything exists together in peace and harmony.

Transiency is the naked nature of time.

Be present, from moment to moment, right in the middle of the real stream of time. That gives you spiritual security.

WHERE DOES THE TIME GO? IN HONEYDOWN, IT WINDS UP AND WINDS DOWN HERE.

and in just a few hours

Today is our most precious possession. It is our only sure possession.

Do you remember the things you were worrying about a year ago? How did they work out? Didn't you waste a lot of fruitless energy on account of most of them? Didn't most of them turn out all right after all?

Think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass...if we do not take [tasks] one at a time and let them pass...slowly and evenly, then we are bound to break our own...structure.

Today is the tommorrow you worried about yesterday.

Five hundred years before Christ was born, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus told his students that everything changes except the law of change. He said: You cannot step in the same river twice. The river changes every second; and so does the man who stepped in it. Life is a ceaseless change. The only certainty is today. Why mar the beauty of living today by trying to solve the problems of a future that is shrouded in ceaseless change and uncertainty-a future that no one can possibly foretell?

If a man will devote his time to securing facts in an impartial, objective way, his worries will usually evaporate in the light of knowledge.

Don't you know I am just as busy as you are – or, at least, I like to think I am.

often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget … Here we are on this earth, with only a few more decades to live, and we lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year's time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worth-while actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings. For life is too short to be little.

You will recall that the White Queen said: "The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam today." Most of us are like that—stewing about yesterday's jam and worrying about tomorrow's jam—instead of spreading today's jam thick on our bread right now.

please feel free to work an extra half hour from time to time if you feel you need to do those "once-in-a-while" things like polishing the cup holders and the like. I, of course, will pay you for the extra time. "The next day, when I walked into my office," Dr. Fitzhugh reported, "my desk had been polished to a mirror-like finish, as had my chair, which I nearly slid out of.

Shut out the yesterdays which have lighted fools the way to dusty death…. The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the strongest falter. Shut off the future as tightly as the past…. The future is today…. There is no tomorrow. The day of man's salvation is now.