Quotes About Time

The time we have to spend each day is elastic: it is stretched by the passions we feel; it is shrunk by those we inspire; and all of it is filled by habit.

But we have looked too far ahead, for all this did not happen until after the Verdurins' party which we have interrupted, and we must go back to the point at which we left off.

Mas uma lembrança, um pesar são coisas móveis. Dias há em que se vão para tão longe que mal os distinguimos e os julgamos desaparecidos. Começamos então a atentar noutras coisas.

timpul meu nu-i chiar atît de pre?ios; cel care l-a f?cut, nu ni l-a vîndut.

The Papacy, we are told, reckons by centuries, and indeed may perhaps not bother to reckon time at all, since its goal is in eternity.

was nevertheless still young, since I had been able to write her one, by means of which I hoped, in telling her of my solitary dreams of love and longing, to arouse similar dreams in her. The sadness of men who have grown old lies in their no longer even thinking of writing such letters, the futility of which their experience has shown.

Marcel Proust

For the fact is that there is no humiliation so great that one should not accept it with unconcern, knowing that at the end of a few years our misdeeds will be no more than an invisible dust buried beneath the smiling and blooming peace of nature.

Une œuvre est à la fois le souvenir de nos amours passées et la prophétie de nos amours nouvelles

With any one member of my little gang of girls, was I not bound to recall only the most recently glimpsed of her possible faces, given that the mind eliminates from our memories of anyone whatever does not contribute in an immediately useful way to our daily dealings with the person, even if—especially if!—these dealings are colored by a tincture of love, which, by being perpetually unsatisfied, lives forever in the coming moment?

Comme sur un plant où les fleurs mûrissent à des époques différentes, je les avais vues, en de vieilles dames, sur cette plage de Balbec, ces dures graines, ces mous tubercules, que mes amies seraient un jour. Mais qu'importait ? en ce moment c'était la saison des fleurs.

Romanistas priver?ia mus per vien? valand? išgyventi vis? galim? džiaugsm? ir sielvart? audr?, kai tikrov?je praeit? met? metai, kol patirtume kai kuriuos iš j?, o stipriausieji mums taip ir neatsiskleist? niekados, nes randasi jie iš l?to ir mes negalime to suvokti.

For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognised in a few years' time

I never allow myself to be influenced either by atmospheric perturbations or by the conventional divisions of time. I would happily instate the use of the opium pipe and the Malay kris, but I know nothing about the use of those infinitely more pernicious and also insipidly bourgeois implements, the watch and the umbrella.

Matote, gyvenime, mano berniuk, ateina toksai laikas, <...>, kai pavargusios akys nebepakelia kitos šviesos tik t?, kuri? graži naktis, kaip šiandien, sukuria ir skleidžia kartu su tamsa, kai ausys nebegali klausytis kitos muzikos, o tik m?nesienos, grojan?ios tylos fleita.

Kaip dažnai gyvenime b?sim? laim? šitaip pražudo nekantra patirti malonum? tuojau pat!

Doubtless my books, like my fleshly being, would, some day, die. But one must resign oneself to death. One accepts the thought that one will die in ten years and one's books in a hundred. Eternal duration is no more promised to works than to men.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

Probably what is wanting, the first time, is not comprehension but memory.

it was like what used to be called a panopticon but a panopticon of years, a view not of a monument but of a person situated in the modifying perspective of Time.

O trabalho de causalidade, que acaba por produzir quase todos os efeitos possíveis, e por conseguinte também aqueles que havíamos julgado menos viáveis, esse trabalho é às vezes lento, tornando-se ainda um pouco mais lento devido ao nosso desejo - que, procurando acelerá-lo, o entrava - e também devido à nossa própria existência, e só se realiza depois de termos deixado de desejar e, muitas vezes, de viver.

It seems that events extend further than the moments in which they happen, and cannot be completely contained within them. Certainly, they spill over into the future through the memories we retain of them, but they also demand space in the time that precedes them. Certainly you will say that at that time we do not see them as they will actually be, but are they not also changed in our memory of them?

Pois como a medicina é um compêndio dos erros sucessivos e contraditórios dos médicos, recorrendo aos melhores destes, corre-se o risco de solicitar uma verdade que será reconhecida falsa alguns anos mais tarde. De modo que acreditar na medicina seria a suprema loucura se não acreditar nela não fosse loucura maior, pois desse amontoado de erros se desvencilharam com o tempo algumas verdades.

Thus I who from infancy, had lived from day to day, with a sort of fixed idea of myself derived from others as well as myself, perceived for the first time, after witnessing the metamorphosis of all these people, that the time which had gone by for them, had gone by for me also and this revelation threw me into consternation.