Quotes About Time

No need, no, need. Life is already too short to find it.

Aye. There's time enough between battles to knit a dozen scarves and a hundred stockings, as well I know." He gave a little bark of laughter. "I thought soldiers spent their idle time dicing and wenching." She gave a surprisingly girlish giggle.

We had this angry phone conversation where he said something like, "We've been working on this thing for a whole month, and it's still not finished." It's funny in retrospect, because we were still working on it 3 years later.

From our vantage point in a time when muck is being raked (and flung) vehemently and constantly twenty-four hours a day, the question of effectiveness is overwhelmed by the question of whether any person in America with access to the media remains shockable or persuadable.

The friends you make in college are friends you'll have for life, even if you don't talk for years at a time.

It's not what you know-or when you see-that matters. It's about the journey.

A fact of modern life is that it takes women longer to get ready than men.

Even after all these years, I am not tired of reading, thinking and writing about this time and the stories people told, and did not tell themselves. I still haven't explored all its corners. I don't know everything. These days, I feel its conflicts and parables running beside us with a particular urgency, crashing over contemporary questions of immigration, religion, and climate change, swirling around our political leaders, demanding: Look at me.

I hear what many of you are saying: We don't have the time, we are busy. Well Nobody Has Time, Everyone Is Busy. In the time it took you to read this post, your life just got a minute shorter. That is precisely why we read (and why some of us write): because life is short and finite, we want more, and literature is the distillation of all those lives we will not lead.

Why would you sacrifice today's freedom for a future that will always remain uncertain, no matter how carefully you plan for it?

Sólo existe certeza con respecto al pasado, y con respecto al futuro, la certeza de la muerte.

Significant changes in the psychological atmosphere accompanied the economic development of capitalism. A spirit of restlessness began to pervade life toward the end of the Middle Ages. The concept of time in the modern sense began to develop. Minutes became valuable [...]. Too many holidays began to appear as a misfortune. Time was so valuable that on felt one should never spend it for any purpose which was not useful. Work became increasingly a supreme value.

When man is born, the human race as well as the individual, he is thrown out of a situation which was definite, as definite as the instincts, into a situation which is indefinite, uncertain and open. There is certainty only about the past—and about the future only as far as that it is death.

This axiom of Aristotelian logic has so deeply imbued our habits of thought that it is felt to be "natural" and self-evident, while on the other hand the statement that X is A and not A seems to be nonsensical. (Of course, the statement refers to the subject X at a given time, not to X now and X later, or one aspect of X as against another aspect.)

One can experience a situation of the past with the same freshness as if it occurred in the here and now; that is, one can re-create the past, bring it to life (resurrect the dead, symbolically speaking). To the extent that one does so, the past ceases to be the past; it is the here and now.

O homem moderno pensa que perde alguma coisa — o tempo — quando não faz as coisas rapidamente; todavia, ele não sabe o que fazer com o tempo que ganha — a não ser matá-lo.

Notóriusan boldogtalan emberek társadalma a miénk: magányosak, félelmektÅ'l gyötörtek, depressziósak, rombolók, függÅ'k vagyunk - olyan emberek, akik boldogok, ha sikerül agyonütniük azt az idÅ't, amelyet szüntelenül meg akarnak spórolni.

But even without theoretical analysis the observable data show most clearly that our kind of "pursuit of happiness" does not produce well-being. We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent—people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.

It is always the same. Whether you are walking or going by train, the way always seems shorter the second time than the first. (And that is true of distances that are not to be measured in miles and yards.)

Der Autor (...) sieht, daß die Zeitgenossen, störrisch wie die Esel, rückwärts laufen, einem klaffenden Abgrund entgegen, in dem Platz für sämtliche Völker Europas ist. Und so ruft er, wie eine Reihe Anderer vor ihm und außer ihm: Achtung, beim Absturz linke Hand am linken Griff!

Um die Hauptsache nicht zu vergessen, bitte ich euch in dieser hoffentlich unverlierbaren Stunde: Vergesst eure Jugend nicht! Das klingt jetzt, wo ihr noch Kinder seid, recht überflüssig. Aber es ist nicht überflüssig. Glaubt es uns! Wir sind älter geworden und trotzdem jung geblieben. Wir wissen Bescheid, wir beiden!

Wie gesagt, das Leben muss noch vor dem Tode erledigt werden.

Er musste an eine Zeichnung von Daumier denken, die Der Fortschritt hieß. Daumier hatte auf dem Blatt Schnecken dargestellt, die hintereinander herkrochen, das war das Tempo der menschlichen Entwicklung. Aber die Schnecken krochen im Kreis! Und das war das Schlimmste.

Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today— when it meant so little.