Quotes About Time

The Tiny Wound.     It is small but painful and irritating. You try all sorts of medicaments, you com- plain, you scratch and pick at the scab. Doctors only make it worse, transforming the tiny wound into a grave matter. If only you had left the wound alone, letting time heal it and freeing yourself of worry.

Your days are numbered. Will you pass them half awake and halfhearted or will you live with a sense of urgency?

There are very few men—and they are the exceptions—who are able to think and feel beyond the present moment.   CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ, 1780-1831

Space we can recover, time never. Napoleon Bonaparte, 1769-1821

Most of us live in a semi-somnambulistic state: we do our daily tasks and the days fly by. The two exceptions to this are childhood and those moments when we are in love. In both cases, our emotions are more engaged, more open and active. And we equate feeling emotional with feeling more alive.

Remember: You have only so much energy and so much time. Every moment wasted on the affairs of others subtracts from your strength. You may be afraid that people will condemn you as heartless, but in the end, maintaining your independence and self-reliance will gain you more respect and place you in a position of power from which you can choose to help others on your own initiative.

People with a lot of time on their hands are extremely susceptible to seduction. They have mental space for you to fill.

A sense of urgency comes from a powerful connection to the present

As a warrior in life, you must turn this dynamic around: make the thought of death something not to escape but to embrace. Your days are numbered. Will you pass them half awake and halfhearted or will you live with a sense of urgency?

Eventually, the time that was not spent on learning skills will catch up with you, and the fall will be painful.

Although time is the critical factor in attaining Mastery and this intuitive feel, the time we are talking about is not neutral or simply quantitative. An hour of Einstein's thinking at the age of sixteen does not equal an hour spent by an average high school student working on a problem in physics. It is not a matter of studying a subject for twenty years, and then emerging as a Master. The time that leads to mastery is dependent on the intensity of our focus.

Time is the greatest weapon you have. Patiently keep in mind a long-term goal and neither person nor army can resist you. And charm is the best way of playing for time, of widening your options in any situation. Through charm you can seduce your enemy into backing off, giving you the psychological space to plot an effective counterstrategy.

Everything in daily life is hurried and improvised, and you need to offer something different. By taking your time and respecting the seductive process you will not only break down your victim's resistance, you will make them fall in love.

And perhaps we have reason to be very grateful that, both as children and long afterwards, we are never allowed to guess how the absorbing pursuit of the moment will appear, not only to others, but to ourselves, a very short time hence.

Time, the destroyer of all things beautiful

Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not.

Better go ahead and dance your jig round that if you've got to, and get it over, and then perhaps we can go on and not waste any more time over rubbish-heaps. Can we EAT a doormat? or sleep under a door-mat? Or sit on a door-mat and sledge home over the snow on it, you exasperating rodent?

You're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you much better not.

We were always ready for tea at any time, and especially when combined with beasts.

People come--they stay for a while, they flourish, they build--and they go. It is their way. But we remain. There were badgers here, I've been told, long before that same city ever came to be. And now there are badgers here again. We are an enduring lot, and we may move out for a time, but we wait, and are patient, and back we come. And so it will ever be.

Do not be defeated by the Feeling that there is too much for you to know. That is a myth of the oppressor. You are Capable of understanding life. And it is yours alone. And only this time.

Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal – as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time.

The preface? Why would he waste time with the preface? Skip the preface and move on to the meat of the thing!

Quante volte sono entrato e uscito da quella porta. Non è così, Mary? Secondo te quante volte, caro? Sei giorni alla settimana, cinquantadue settimane all'anno per cinquantacinque anni, rispose lui. Quanto fa? Fa una vita intera. È vero. È la vita di un uomo, disse Dad