Quotes About Time

There was a time, and we can easily see it in the five or six centuries that run roughly from the time of Socrates to the time of Epictetus, when the idea of education was very simple, and the supposed consequences of education, tremendous. With us, it is the other way around.

And crawling on the planet's face, some insects called the human race. Lost in time, and lost in space. And meaning.

In this fleeting life, there is nothing stronger than a visual idea or moment stopped in time forever. And nothing does this better than a black-and-white photograph.

She said that time was like the Mississippi River. It only flows in one direction. She meant you could never go back. But of course we had. She'd taken me back.

It was always August.

Are all my memories true? Every word, and growing truer with the years.

But just for a moment they were caught in the grip of this place. They felt the weight of its history, and mystery. So did I. The paper was loose and peeling on the walls. I wondered how many layers you'd have to scrape away until you came to the time when these old people were young. If they ever were. I wondered how quiet you'd have to be to hear the voices of those times.

You were not cut out for a quiet life because you are honest to a fault. A man can want something to the point of indecency, he said, and when he attains his goal, it is ashes in his mouth and a bad conscience. The twentieth century did not look to be an age with any patience for the past.

To Save Time is to Lengthen Life," proclaimed the Remington Typewriter Company.

Maybe to save time is not to lengthen life, after all. Maybe the more efficiently you speed through life, the quicker you reach your death.

Phenomenal, to be such a small, weak, short-lived being on a planet with billions of years left to run.

Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you're free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you.

Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you're free.

Time didn't age you; memory did.

She saw how the mind makes forever, in order to store the things it had already lost.

Thick, clotted, craggy, but solid on the earth, and covered in other living things. Three hundred years growing, three hundred years holding, three hundred years dying. Oak.

The laws that govern the light from a firefly in my backyard as I write these words tonight also govern the light emitted from an exploding star one billion light-years away. Place changes nothing. Nor does time. One set of fixed rules runs the game, in all times and places. That's as big a truth as we Earthling have discovered, or ever will, in our brief run.

For me it's connection-the pleasure of an expansive, long-ranging dinner conversation with people who do all sorts of things and being able to come back to that night, night after night, and pick up threads and follow them. There's a voyeuristic pleasure, there's a synthetic pleasure, but primarily it's the pleasure of being able to live in a frame of time that the rest of life conspires to annihilate.

The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

And you, fallen Wendy, eviscerated by the eternal recurrence of it all, hear Peter snarl at you for growing guilty and big and old...

Written music is like nothing in the world—an index of time. The idea is so bizarre, it's almost miraculous: fixed instructions on how to recreate the simultaneous. How to be a flow, both motion and instant, both stream and cross section.

Life has a way of talking to the future. It's called memory.

Maybe the key to acclaim is simply to live long enough. But then, maybe acclaim is the foyer to death.

Time alters what can be owned, and who may do the owning. Humankind is utterly wrong about the neighbors, and no one can see it. We must repay the world for every idea, every thing we have ever stolen.