Quotes About Time

This water lily was the same, and it was also like one of those miserable creatures whose singular torment, repeated indefinitely throughout eternity, aroused the curiosity of Dante, who would have asked the tormented creature himself to recount its cause and its particularities at greater length had Virgil, striding on ahead, not forced him to hurry after immediately, as my parents did me.

could hear the tick of Saint-Loup's watch, which must have been somewhere near at hand. The tick changed place all the time, for I could not see the watch; it seemed to be coming from behind me, from in front, from my right, from my left, sometimes to die away as though it were coming from a long way off. Suddenly I caught sight of the watch on a table. So now I heard the tick in a fixed place, from which it did not move again.

May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend; and then, even when the time comes, which is coming now for me, when the woods are all black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself, as I am doing, by looking up to the sky.

Os lugares que conhecemos não pertencem tampouco ao mundo do espaço, onde os situamos para maior facilidade. Não eram mais que uma delgada fatia no meio de impressões contíguas que formavam a nossa vida de então; a recordação de certa imagem não é senão saudade de certo instante; as casas, os caminhos, as avenidas são fugitivos, infelizmente, como os anos.

The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.

l tempo di cui disponiamo ogni giorno è elastico: le passioni che proviamo lo dilatano, quelle che ispiriamo lo restringono, e l'abitudine lo colma.

Die Erinnerung an ein bestimmtes Bild ist wehmutsvolles Gedenken an einen bestimmten Augenblick; und Häuser, Straßen, Avenuen sind flüchtig, ach! Wie die Jahre.

Or chaque jour était pour moi un pays différent.

But memories and griefs are fleeting things.

All the more because situations, while repeating them

whether one day "Guermantes" itself may survive as anything other than a place-name, except to archaeologists who stop briefly in Combray,

Je ne me laisse jamais influencer par les perturbations de l'atmosphère ni par les divisions conventionnelle du temps

When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth's surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks.

The person that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man whom I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.

It's no more obsolete than the Iliad. I may

she believed came from her admirer but which was due in effect to the utter impossibility of finding pleasure when one spends all one's time looking for it.

I do not ask to live to a hundred," my aunt would say, for she preferred to have no definite limit fixed to the number of her days.

Now the memories of love are no exception to the general laws of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general laws of Habit.

the best way to gain time is to change one's place of residence. My

time would come when I should have to digest the cakes that I took without noticing them.

The dead last so short a time … Alas, in the coffin they crumble into dust, Less quickly than in our hearts!

as those old engravings of the 'Cenacolo,' or that painting by Gentile Bellini, in which one sees, in a state in which they no longer exist, the masterpiece of Leonardo and the portico of Saint Mark's. We

all this made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town: an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space—the name of the fourth being Time—extending through the centuries its ancient nave, which, bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which it emerged triumphant,

they stand like giants immersed in Time.