Quotes About Time

Ars longa, vita brevis—art is long and time is fleeting: this is the tragedy of every great soul.

No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.

We shall never have any experience which we shall not interpret in terms of space and time and cause; but we shall never have any philosophy if we forget that these are not things, but modes of interpretation and understanding.

History, said Bacon, is the planks of a shipwreck; more of the past is lost than has been saved.

Society is a growth in time, not a syllogism in logic; and when the past is put out through the door it comes in at the window.

time as a sense of before and after, or a measurement of motion, is of course subjective, and highly relative; but a tree will age, wither and decay whether or not the lapse of time is measured or perceived.

Let me have seven hours a week, and I will make a scholar and a philosopher out of you; in four years, you shall be as well educated as any new-fledged Doctor of Philosophy in the land.

The tragedy of life is that it gives us wisdom only when it has stolen youth.

They measured time by a clepsydra or water-clock, and a sun-dial, and these seem to have been not merely developed but invented by them.

The division of our month into four weeks, of our clock into twelve hours (instead of twenty-four), of our hour into sixty minutes, and of our minute into sixty seconds, are unsuspected Babylonian vestiges in our contemporary world.XVI

How little you know the age you live in, says a god in Ovid, if you fancy that honey is sweeter than cash in hand.

Darwin furthered the transformation. As the astronomer had lost the Earth in space, the biologist lost man in the infinity of time, in the long procession of transitory species that had walked the earth or swum the sea or flown the air; man became a mere line in Nature's interminable odyssey. But it was Darwin, too, who opened a way to what John Morley called "the next great task of science—to create a new religion for humanity.

Generaciones de hombres establecen un dominio creciente sobre la tierra, pero están destinados a convertirse en fósiles en su suelo.

A man's shortcomings," said Goethe, "are taken from his epoch; his virtues and greatness belong to himself.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

Knowledge grows, but wisdom, though it can improve with years, does not progress with centuries. I cannot instruct Solomon. So, brave reader, you have fair warning: proceed at your own risk. But I shall be warmed by your company. Will Durant

It is clear that as our walking is admittedly nothing but a constantly-prevented falling, so the life of our bodies is nothing but a constantly-prevented dying, an ever-postponed death."86

In the last 3,421 years of recorded history, only 268 have seen no war

If I were dying when I should've, say in the late sixties, when I thought my head would explode with howling misery, when every time their father opened his fat mouth I thought I'd have to kill him, then – then I would've written the girls affectionate letters, telling them of my sadness, and how much I loved them, and how sorry I was to be leaving them. Too late. They're here, they're grown-up, they're crap, and so we'll bicker towards oblivion.

Whereas we, the dead, are the true inheritors of the Modern. The live lot assemble time into lazy decadences--ten-year periods of conspicuous attitudinising, which are only ever grasped in nostalgic retrospect.

Oh, the future--it's always so fucking dated. For you, for me, for all of us. If only there were some way out of it.

And then you're old, and your life is like a book you read too quickly. All you can remember are a few scattered images and random thoughts. No sense of the whole.

Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.