TIME QUOTES IV
quotations about time
Time is the great physician.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Endymion
As you read this sentence, you probably think that this moment--right now--is what is happening. The present moment feels special. It is real. However much you may remember the past or anticipate the future, you life in the present. Of course, the moment during which you read that sentence is no longer happening. This one is. In other words, it feels as though time flows, in the sense that the present is constantly updating itself. We have a deep intuition that the future is open until it becomes present and that the past is fixed. As time flows, this structure of fixed past, immediate present and open future gets carried forward in time. This structure is built into our language, thought and behavior. How we live our lives hangs on it. Yet as natural as this way of thinking is, you will not find it reflected in science. The equations of physics do not tell us which events are occurring right now--they are like a map without the "you are here" symbol. The present moment does not exist in them, and therefore neither does the flow of time.
CRAIG CALLENDER
Scientific American, June 2010
Time is just common, it's like water for a fish. Everybody's in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. That's all. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn't care.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
Change of days
To us is sensible; and each revolve
Of the recording sun conducts us on
Farther in life, and nearer to our goal
Not so with Time--mysterious chronicler,
He knoweth not mutation--centuries
Are to his being as a day, and days
As centuries--Time past, and Time to come
Are always equal: when the world began
God had existed from eternity.
HENRY KIRKE WHITE
"Time", The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White
If we consider eternity, into that time never entered; eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is as a short parenthesis in a long period; and eternity had been the same as it is, though time had never been.
JOHN DONNE
Book of Devotions
Man's most prudent counselor is time.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus
Time eases all things.
SOPHOCLES
Oedipus Rex
The long unmeasured pulse of time moves everything. There is nothing hidden that it cannot bring to light, nothing once known that may not become unknown. Nothing is impossible.
SOPHOCLES
Ajax
Time is a train
Makes the future the past
Leaves you standing in the station
Your face pressed up against the glass
U2
"Zoo Station"
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY
The Little Prince
One day some as yet unborn scholar will recognize in the clock the machine that has tamed the wilds.
J. M. COETZEE
In the Heart of the Country
Nothing keeps. There is one law in the universe: NOW.
ALFRED SUTRO
The Open Door
Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.
BOB DYLAN
The Times They Are A-Changin'
Time is a face on the water.
STEPHEN KING
Wolves of the Calla
Time! Joyless emblem of the greed
Of millions, robber of the best
Which earth can give ...
AMY LOWELL
"New York at Night"
One of the best gifts my parents gave us was not only this awareness of time but what they did with that time. And having that awareness of time is a very special kind of perspective. It shapes my every day.
NANCY BOROWICK
"The gift of time: Life before death", CNN, May 14, 2017
Time, you'll be pleased to know--and since one must start somewhere--was created in creation. The question What was there before creation? is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.
GLEN DUNCAN
I, Lucifer
Time is not a thing that passes ... it's a sea on which you float.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
The wings of Time are black and white,
Pied with morning and with night.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Compensation