Quotes About Time

More wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of the ocean. Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my days I have watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant in space and time.

No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it--and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order ... defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law ... are concerned.

Time! Joyless emblem of the greed Of millions, robber of the best Which earth can give ...

Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart.

Softly comes Old Age, the thief, Steals the rapture, leaves the throes.

Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides Into the silent hollow of the past; What is there that abides To make the next age better for the last?

Past and present commingle: Eternity in the single blink of an eye!

Sometimes waiting is the hardest thing of all.

Time is a trust, and for every minute of it you will have to account.

Many a blessing has been recognized too late.

Do not let your picture of the whole of your life confuse you, do not dwell upon all the manifold troubles which have come to pass and will come to pass; but ask yourself in regard to every passing moment: what is there here that cannot be borne and cannot be endured? Then remind yourself that it is not the future or the past that weighs heavy upon you, but always the present, and that this gradually grows less. (Meditations, VIII, 36)

The present moment is the only dimension of existence worth inhabiting, because it is the only one available to us. (...) Yet we live virtually all of our lives somewhere between memories, and aspirations, nostalgia and expectations.

the irreversibility of things is a kind of death at the heart of life and threatens constantly to steer us into time past- the home of nostalgia, guilt, regret and remorse, the great spoilers of happiness.

Sive parens rerum, cum primum informia regna Materiamque rudem flamma cedente recpit, Fixit in aeternum causas, qua cuncta coercet Se quoque lege tenens, et saecula iussa ferentem Fatorum inmoto divisit limite mundum; Sive nihil positom est sed fors incerta vagatur Fertque refertque vices, et habet mortalia casus: Sit subitum, quodcumque paras; sit caeca future Mens hominum fati; liceat sperare timenti.

So when the world's compounded union breaks, Time ends and to old Chaos all things turn;...Dissolve the engines of the broken world. All great things crush themselves, such end the gods...

Your body expresses yesterday in what it wants today. If you think: yesterday I was, tomorrow I shall be, you are thinking: I have died a little. Be what you are becoming, without clinging to what you might have been, what you might yet be. Never settle. Leave definitiveness to the undecided; we don't need it.

A life of adventure is ours for the taking, whether we're seven or seventy. Life for the most part is what me make it. We have been given a responsibility to live it fully, joyfully, completely, and richly, in whatever span of time God grants us on this earth.

The Campus laundry has a sign, like most laundries do, POSITIVELY NO DYEING. I drove all over town with a green bedspread until I came to Angel's with his yellow sign, YOU CAN DIE HERE ANYTIME.

El problema es que cuando vuelves a la vida normal, todas las rutinas, las marcas del día a día parecen mentiras sin sentido. Todo es sospechoso, una trampa para adormecernos, para volver a arroparnos en la plácida inexorabilidad del tiempo.

Sighs, the rhythms of our heartbeats, contractions of childbirth, orgasms, all flow into time just as pendulum clocks placed next to one another soon beat in unison. Fireflies in a tree flash on and off as one. The sun comes up and it goes down. The moon waxes and wanes and usually the morning paper hits the porch at six thirty-five.

My sons have all grown now, so I'm down from five washers to one, but one takes just as long.

shutters as old as Herman Melville.

Toda luna, todo año, todo día, todo viento camino, y pasa también. También, toda sangre llega al lugar de su quietud. (Libros de Chilam Balam)

On the plane to Mexico City, I thought about how death shreds time. My ordinary life had vanished.