Quotes About Time

It's only the desire to live as long as possible that makes everything seem complicated and mysterious.

La infancia es un periodo en el que el tiempo y el espacio se mezclan.

So it is that time reenacts the most curious yet earnest spectacles within the human heart.

How cursed a thing it was! Yes, in the cries of the cicadas that echoed from the surrounding hills, I could hear this eternity, which was like a curse on my head, which had shut me up in the golden plaster.

I ricordi erano causa di ferite ogni giorno più profonde.

Les oreilles des vieillards ne sont-elles pas de vrais coquillages constamment lavés par le flot et pleins de sagesse ?

Emprender un viaje produce un sentimiento misterioso. Uno cree haberse liberado no sólo de los lugares que quedan a sus espaldas, sino tambien del tiempo que deja detrás de si.

HOW ODDLY SITUATED a man is apt to find himself at age thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression.

We do not collide with our destiny all of a sudden.

Venne un giorno, agli sgoccioli della primavera, che sembrava lo scampolo che un sarto avesse staccato da una pezza d'estate, oppure una prova in costume della stagione ventura.

El correr tiene un fin y el reposar también. La muerte parece que es el último reposo, aunque ni siquiera eso hay manera de saber cuánto dura.

One letter that still remains very vivid in my mind was written in pencil on a piece of rice-paper in a youthful, almost careless scribble. If my memory is not mistaken, it was to the following effect, and broke off abruptly in just this fashion: "At the moment I am full of life, my whole body overflowing with youth and strength. It seems impossible that I shall be dead in three hours' time. And yet...

When he was young, there had been only one reality, and the future had seemed to stretch before him, swelling with immense possibilities. But as he grew older, reality seemed to take many forms, and it was the past that seemed refracted into innumerable possibilities

Come svanisce velocemente il ricordo delle azioni, a paragone con il ricordo dei sentimenti!»

If one looks down on one's old village from a distant mountain pass, whatever details of that era may have faded from memory, the significance of having lived there becomes vividly apparent.

A passagem do tempo, nunca deixa de fazer suas vítimas, sempre transforma o que era sublime em matéria para comédia. O que afinal fica corroído? Se o exterior é corroído, será verdade, então, que o sublime pertence por natureza apenas a um exterior que esconde um cerne cômico? Ou será que o sublime pertence de fato ao todo, mas acaba coberto por uma poeira ridícula?

When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.

Time is what matters. As time goes by, you and I will be carried inexorably into the mainstream of our period, even though we're unaware of what it is. And later, when they say that young men in the early Taisho era thought, dressed, talked, in such and such a way, they'll be talking about you and me. We'll all be lumped together…. In a few decades, people will see you and the people you despise as one and the same, a single entity.

Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music.

The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.

I will die soon anyway... I too will cut the adombinal thread of time...but I will cut it with my own hands!

Years ago you followed someone here, in love with breath kissing the nape of your neck, back when it was easy to be at least two places at once.

The older I get the quicker Christmas comes, but if I had to give up the heavenly taste of Guinness dark, I couldn't live another goddamn day. Darling, you can chisel that into my headstone.

Everything has its place and time. We men of the nineteen-forties can smile at the mistakes of the nineteen-thirties, and, in turn, the men of the nineteen-fifties will laugh at the mistakes of the nineteen-forties. It is this historical perspective that shall save us.