Quotes About Time

Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song. I kiss you and the world begins to fade.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep

It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is

We sat grown quiet at the name of love; We saw the last embers of daylight die, And in the trembling blue-green of the sky A moon, worn as if it had been a shell Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell About the stars and broke in days and years. I had a thought for no one's but your ears: That you were beautiful, and that I strove To love you in the old high way of love; That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown As weary-hearted as that hollow moon

Time drops in decay Like a candle burnt out. And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day; But, kindly old rout Of the fire-born moods, You pass not away.

How far away the stars seem, and how far Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!

My fiftieth year had come and gone, I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top. While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless.

The Wheel Through winter-time we call on spring, And through the spring on summer call, And when abounding hedges ring Declare that winter's best of all; And after that there's nothing good Because the spring-time has not come -- Nor know what disturbs our blood Is but its longing for the tomb.

The last stroke of midnight dies. All day in the one chair From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged In rambling talk with an image of air: Vague memories, nothing but memories.

it's a long lane that has no turning.

Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge.

The Nineteenth Century And After Though the great song return no more There's keen delight in what we have: The rattle of pebbles on the shore Under the receding wave.

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn, Come clear of the nets of wrong and right; Laugh heart again in the gray twilight, Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

So the platonic Year Whirls out new right and wrong, Whirls in the old instead; All men are dancers and their tread Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.

Oh, who could have foretold That the heart grows old?

I heard the old, old man say, "Everything alters, And one by one we drop away." They had hands like claws, and their knees Were twisted like the old thorn trees By the waters. I heard the old, old man say, "All that is beautiful drifts away Like the waters.

IMITATED FROM THE JAPANESE A MOST astonishing thing — Seventy years have I lived; (Hurrah for the flowers of Spring, For Spring is here again.) Seventy years have I lived No ragged beggar-man, Seventy years have I lived, Seventy years man and boy, And never have I danced for joy.

With us nothing has time to gather meaning, and too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold.

Never leave the door open at this hour, or evil may come to you.

Aedh tells of the perfect Beauty" O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes, The poets labouring all their days To build a perfect beauty in rhyme Are overthrown by a woman's gaze And by the unlabouring brood of the skies: And therefore my heart will bow, when dew Is dropping sleep, until God burn time, Before the unlabouring stars and you.

THE CELTIC TWILIGHT by W. B. YEATS Time drops in decay Like a candle burnt out. And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day; But, kindly old rout Of the fire-born moods, You pass not away.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep — W.B. Yeats, from "When You are Old," The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats . (Scribner; 2nd Revised edition September 9, 1996) Originally published 1889.

Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!

I cast my heart into my rhymes, That you, in the dim coming times, May know how my heart went with them