quotations about time
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
We're sitting here and time is going on, and we know what it means to say that time is going on. I don't know what it means to say that time really doesn't pass and it's only in virtue of entropy increasing that it seems to.
TIM MAUDLIN
"A Defense of the Reality of Time", Quanta Magazine, May 16, 2017
The universe may be timeless, but if you imagine breaking it into pieces, some of the pieces can serve as clocks for the others. Time emerges from timelessness. We perceive time because we are, by our very nature, one of those pieces.
CRAIG CALLENDER
Scientific American, June 2010
Ye are but actors moved at Time's behest,
And king or slave as shifts the pantomime.
KENNETH RAND
"Sonnet"
Remember that time slurs over everything, let all deeds fade, blurs all writings and kills all memories. Exempt are only those which dig into the hearts of men by love.
ARISTOTLE
letter to Alexander on the policy toward the Cities
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
T. S. ELIOT
"Burnt Norton", Four Quartets
Time, so complain'd of,
Who to no one man
Shows partiality,
Brings round to all men
Some undimm'd hours.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Consolation"
We do live and breathe,
And we are gone. The spoiler heeds us not.
We have our spring-time and our rottenness;
And as we fall, another race succeeds.
To perish likewise--Meanwhile Nature smiles--
The seasons run their round--The Sun fulfils
His annual course--and heaven and earth remain
Still changing, yet unchanged--still doom'd to feel
Endless mutation in perpetual rest.
Where are concealed the days which have elapsed?
Hid in the mighty cavern of THE PAST,
They rise upon us only to appal,
By indistinct and half-glimpsed images,
Misty, gigantic, huge, obscure, remote.
HENRY KIRKE WHITE
"Time", The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White
Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
One must work with time and not against it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Time is the longest distance between two places.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
The Glass Menagerie
My father Time is weak and gray
With waiting for a better day;
See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
The Mask of Anarchy
O aching time! O moments big as years!
JOHN KEATS
"Hyperion: A Fragment"
Time is a seedfield; in youth we sow it with causes; in after life we reap the harvest of effects.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
Time is the root of all this earth;
These creatures, who from Time had birth,
Within his bosom at the end
Shall sleep; Time hath nor enemy nor friend.
BHARTRHARI
"Time"
Time means less than the color of zero.
RAVEN GREGORY
Alice in Wonderland, issue #1, January 2012
It rolls in grandeur lone--
The stream of Time;
And on its shores lie strown
The wrecks of every clime.
HARVEY RICE
"The Stream of Time"
Time is an impartial distributor.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Time is the father of mutability.
SOLON
attributed, Day's Collacon
Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.
HENRI BERGSON
Creative Evolution