Selected time quotes

1. The irrevocable Hand That opes the year's fair gate, doth ope and shut The portals of our earthly destinies; We walk through blindfold, and the noiseless doors Close after us, for ever. Pause, my soul, On these strange words - for ever - whose large sound Breaks flood-like, drowning all the petty noise Our human moans make on the shores of Time. O Thou that openest, and no man shuts; That shut'st, and no man opens - Thee we wait!

2. Autumn to winter, winter into spring, Spring into summer, summer into fall, - So rolls the changing year, and so we change; Motion so swift, we know not that we move.

3. It is astonishing what a lot of odd minutes one can catch during the day, if one really sets about it.

4. Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend - or a meaningful day.

5. If you judge people, you have no time to love them.

6. It is a pity that, as one gradually gains experience, one loses one's youth.

7. I do not intend to spare myself, not to avoid emotions or difficulties. I don't care much whether I live a longer or shorter time: the world concerns me only in so far as I feel a certain debt toward it, because I have walked on this earth for thirty years, and out of gratitude I want to leave some souvenir.

8. There, like the wind through woods in riot, Through him the gale of life blew high; The tree of man was never quiet: Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.

9. You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.

10. In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.

11. I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

12. To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it.

13. I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.

14. To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.

15. Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

16. Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

17. You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth. Ideas do not reach perfection in a day, no matter how much study is put upon them.

18. I think that's what makes life interesting - the evolution of getting older, and it's kinda fascinating to me, the whole process.

19. I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

20. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

21. In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.

22. Let us love the passing hour, let us hurry up and enjoy our time.

23. What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death?

24. Take time to deliberate; but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in.

25. Gather the flowers, but spare the buds.

26. My sculpture can last for days or a few seconds - what is important to me is the experience of making. I leave all my work outside and often return to watch it decay.

27. I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

28. The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass.

29. No matter how long we exist, we have our memories. Points in time which time itself cannot erase. Suffering may distort my backward glances, but even to suffering, some memories will yield nothing of their beauty or their splendor. Rather they remain as hard as gems.

30. How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

31. Barchester Towers has become one of those novels which do not die quite at once, which live and are read for perhaps a quarter of a century.

32. One hour of right-down love is worth an age of dully living on.

33. Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.

34. Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last.

35. Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.

36. Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

37. Thought may well be ever ranging, And opinion ever changing, Task-work be, though ill begun, Dealt with by experience better; By the law and by the letter Duty done is duty done Do it, Time is on the wing!

38. O tell me, friends, while yet we part, And heart can yet be heard of heart, O tell me then, for what is it Our early plan of life we quit; From all our old intentions range, And why does all so wholly change? O tell me, friends, while yet we part!

39. Dance on, dance on, we see, we see Youth goes, alack, and with it glee, A boy the old man ne'er can be; Maternal thirty scarce can find The sweet sixteen long left behind.

40. As ships becalmed at eve, that lay With canvas drooping, side by side, Two towers of sail, at dawn of day Are scarce, long leagues apart, descried.

41. Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing? (p. 14e)

42. One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

43. He who hesitates is a damned fool.

44. Our anti-Communism came to us neither as the fruit of a special wisdom nor as a humiliating awakening from a prolonged deception, but as a natural event, the product of chance and propinquity. One thing followed another, and the will had little to say about it. For my part, during that year, I realized, with a certain wistfulness, that it was too late for me to become any kind of Marxist. Marxism, I saw, from the learned young man I listened to at Committee meetings, was something you had to take up young, like ballet dancing.

45. We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.

46. The day of your birth leads you to death as well as to life.

47. Live as long as you please, you will strike nothing off the time you will have to spend dead.

48. Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough.

49. All of the days go toward death and the last one arrives there.

50. Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.

51. Labour not after riches first, and think thou afterwards wilt enjoy them. He who neglecteth the present moment, throweth away all that he hath. As the arrow passeth through the heart, while the warrior knew not that it was coming; so shall his life be taken away before he knoweth that he hath it.

52. The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.

53. We never know, believe me, when we have succeeded best.

54. And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity.

55. Besos que vienen riendo, luego llorando se van, y en ellos se va la vida, que nunca mas volvera.

56. From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

57. Whatever shall we do in that remote spot? Well, we will write our memoirs. Work is the scythe of time.

58. Greatness is nothing unless it be lasting.

59. Ambition never is in a greater hurry than I; it merely keeps pace with circumstances and with my general way of thinking.

60. Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

61. Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less concerned about the latter than the former. Space we can recover, lost time never.

62. The favorable opportunity must be seized; for fortune is female, and if you balk her today you must not expect to meet her again tomorrow.

63. The stupid speak of the past, the wise of the present, and fools of the future.

64. There is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike at, and who steals what is most precious to men: time.

65. You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? Excuse me, I have no time to listen to such nonsense.

66. Do not wait; the time will never be 'just right.' Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.

67. Procrastination is the bad habit of putting off until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday.

68. The time for the healing of the wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come. The time to build is upon us.

69. There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

70. Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

71. In my time, the follies of the town crept slowly among us, but now they travel faster than a stagecoach.

72. I'll be with you in the squeezing of a lemon.

73. The first blow is half the battle.

74. Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.

75. He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing.

76. Punctuality is the thief of time.

77. What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us.

78. Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is.

79. Usually quoted as: No man is rich enough to buy back his own past.

80. Oh, why will parents always appear at the wrong time? Some extraordinary mistake in nature, I suppose.

81. My dear father, when one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.

82. I know not whether Laws be right, Or whether Laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol Is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, A year whose days are long.

83. Only a ripe fruit falls to the ground. Ripeness is all. An unripe ego cannot be thrown, cannot be destroyed. And if you struggle with an unripe ego to destroy and dissolve it, the whole effort is going to be a failure. Rather than destroying it, you will find it more strengthened in new subtle ways. This is something basic to be understood: the ego must come to a peak, it must be strong, it must have attained an integrity - only then can you dissolve it. A weak ego cannot be dissolved.

84. Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.'.(quoting John Greenleaf Whittier)

85. I don't know if you have had the same experience, but a thing I have found in life is that from time to time, as you jog along, there occur moments which you are able to recognize immediately with the naked eye as high spots. Something tells you that they are going to remain etched, if etched is the word I want, for ever on the memory and will come back to you at intervals down the years, as you are dropping off to sleep, banishing that drowsy feeling and causing you to leap on the pillow like a gaffed salmon.

86. 'Suppose your Aunt Dahlia read in the paper one morning that you were going to be shot at sunrise.' 'I couldn't be, I'm never up so early.'

87. El camino de la juventud lleva toda una vida.

88. Hace falta mucho, mucho tiempo para ser joven.

89. All I ever made was made for the present and in the hope it will always remain in the present.

90. I hope we'll be able to solve these problems before we leave. And when I say 'before we leave', I mean 'before we die'.

91. Can a souffle rise twice?

92. The future is not what it used to be.

93. The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

94. Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.

95. Praise out of season, or tactlessly bestowed, can freeze the heart as much as blame.

96. Seems like yesterday; seems like forever-all at the same time. It's sort of, how do you measure it? Do you measure the fact that I'm 20 years older? No. I think I measure it by the events. You know, I came just as the Cold War was coming to an end. When you think about the events that we've been through, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to, I guess you'd say, 9/11 being the culmination at the end of that - of that scope - what extraordinary changes there have been.

97. Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.

98. This is an artifact and that was a relic. This is alive in the now, whereas that merely remained.

99. Life is short. Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it. Here I stand. But no longer.

100. Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind's eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed ... Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went.