Quotes About Time

He is winding the watch of his wit by and by it will strike.

How poor are they who have not patience What wound did ever heal but by degrees.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end.

Not a whit, we defy augury: there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes?

The sands are number'd that make up my life.

This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath, May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.

Time hath a wallet at his back, wherein he puts. Alms for oblivion, a great-sized monster of ingratitudes.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

The swift years slip and slide adown the steep; The slow years pass; neither will come again.

There's a joy and a pain about directing where the dreams you have are becoming concrete but the attention to detail, the need for time is such that it's overwhelming at times, and the stream of responsibility.

There are many lives in a lifetime.

It was one of those times when the unsatisfactory complexity of the world fades far enough into the distance for the moment to become a thing in itself.

All of us are too much concerned with this life," she remarked; she spoke as if what she were saying was an obvious fact instead of a philosophic platitude. "It is time that a man like Julian

The afterlife I leave to God, who is merciful and far too busy for impertinent questions from me. I may want to know more, but I don't need to. "One world at a time"-that's my feeling and that's more than enough given the present anguish that engulfs it.

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.

We were traveling between a mountain and Thursday, Holding pages back on the calendar, Remembering every turn in the roadway: We hold that sky, we said, and remember. So magic a time it was that I was both brave and afraid. Some day like this might save the world.

Waiting for God" This morning I breathed in. It had rained early and the sycamore leaves tapped a few drops that remained, while waving the air's memory back and forth over the lawn and into our open window. Then I breathed out. This deliberate day eased past the calendar and waited. Patiently the sun instructed the shadows how to move; it held them, guided their gradual defining. In the great quiet I carried my life on, in again, out again.

They say that history is going on somewhere. They say it won't stop. I have held One picture still for a long time and waited.

The Way It Is There's a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn't change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can't get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer and get old. Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding. You don't ever let go of the thread. ~ William Stafford ~

Why I Am Happy Now has come, an easy time. I let it roll. There is a lake somewhere so blue and far nobody owns it. A wind comes by and a willow listens gracefully. I hear all this, every summer. I laugh and cry for every turn of the world, its terribly cold, innocent spin. That lake stays blue and free; it goes on and on. And I know where it is.

Yet the great weakness of linear time is that it obliterates time's recurrence and thus cuts people off from the eternal—whether in nature, in each other, or in ourselves. When we deem our social destiny entirely self-directed and our personal lives self-made, we lose any sense of participating in a collective myth larger than ourselves. We cannot ritually join with those who come before or after us.

We may prefer to see ourselves as masters of nature, controllers of all change and progress, exempt from the seasons of history. Yet the more we balk at seasonality and the more we try to eradicate it, the more menacing we render our view of time—and of the future.

The next Fourth Turning—America's next rendezvous with destiny—will begin in roughly ten years and end in roughly thirty.

When Aristotle said that poetry is superior to history because history only tells us "what Alcibiades did or had done to him," he had in mind history as the mere compilation of facts. To matter, history has to do more. It has to reconnect people, in time, to what Aristotle called the "timeless forms" of nature.