Time
Quotes
Time
has no Meaning
“People
never seemed to notice that, by saving time, they were losing something else.
No one cared to admit that life was becoming ever poorer, bleaker and more
monotonous. The ones who felt this most keenly were the children, because no
one had time for them any more. But time is life itself, and life resides in
the human heart. And the more people saved, the less they had.”
―
Michael Ende, Momo
“If
you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a
normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of
the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the
next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day
five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin
of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty
minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first
seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the
scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the
Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after,
with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.
Thanks
to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the
great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first
winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M.
and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to
midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute
and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on
this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely
an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and
bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt
away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout
the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a
flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even
larger. It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled
environment. In fact, not many things do for long.”
―
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
“Time
has no meaning,
Love
will endure..”
―
Jude Deveraux
“How
little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a
long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life
in these four days; more, I think than in all other time. I'd like to be an old
man to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a
certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew so many things that I
know nothing of. I wish there was more time.”
―
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
“I
wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For
now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My
thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their
watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto
my finger, like a dial's point,
Is
pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now
sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are
clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which
is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans
Show
minutes, times, and hours.”
―
William Shakespeare, Richard II
“Casting
aside other things, hold to the precious few; and besides bear in mind that
every man lives only the present, which is an indivisible point, and that all
the rest of his life is either past or is uncertain. Brief is man's life and
small the nook of the earth where he lives; brief, too, is the longest
posthumous fame, buoyed only by a succession of poor human beings who will very
soon die and who know little of themselves, much less of someone who died long
ago.”
―
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“If
you have the woman you love, what more do you need? Well, besides an alibi for
the time of her husband’s murder.
”
―
Dark Jar Tin Zoo, Love Quotes for the Ages. Specifically Ages 19-91.
“Life
has a way of going in circles. Ideally, it would be a straight path
forward––we'd always know where we were going, we'd always be able to move on
and leave everything else behind. There would be nothing but the present and
the future. Instead, we always find ourselves where we started. When we try to
move ahead, we end up taking a step back. We carry everything with us, the
weight exhausting us until we want to collapse and give up.
We
forget things we try to remember. We remember things we'd rather forget. The
most frightening thing about memory is that it leaves no choice. It has
mastered an incomprehensible art of forgetting. It erases, it smudges, it fills
in blank spaces with details that don't exist.
But
however we remember it––or choose to remember it––the past is the foundation
that holds our lives in place. Without its support, we'd have nothing for
guidance. We spend so much time focused on what lies ahead, when what has
fallen behind is just as important. What defines us isn't where we're going,
but where we've been. Although there are places and people we will never see
again, and although we move on and let them go, they remain a part of who we
are.
There
are things that will never change, things we will carry along with us always.
But as we venture into the murky future, we must find our strength by learning
to leave things behind.”
―
Brigid Gorry-Hines
“Nothing
endures but change.”
―
Heraclitus
“You
never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it
time, it's time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of
the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess
the winning cards of life, our lives.”
―
José Saramago, Blindness
“Do
not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.”
―
Joan Didion, Blue Nights
“A
revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future
and the past.”
―
Fidel Castro
“Time
is the most valuable thing that a man can spend.”
―
Diogenes
“It’s
not that we have to quit this life one day, it’s how many things we have to
quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling
leaves, vanilla and jasmine, poppies, smiling, anthills, the color of the sky,
coffee and cashmere, literature, sparks and subway trains... If only one could
leave this life slowly!”
―
Roman Payne, Hope and Despair
“Time,
as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.”
―
Michelle Obama, Becoming
“despite
knowing
they
won’t be here for long
they
still choose to live
their
brightest lives
-
sunflowers”
―
Rupi Kaur, The sun and her flowers
“I
met a boy whose eyes showed me that the past, present and future were all the
same thing.”
―
Jennifer Elisabeth
“And
meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel
like shit.”
―
Martin Amis, London Fields
“Stop
trying to be less of who you are. Let this time in your life cut you open and
drain all of the things that are holding you back.”
―
Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl
