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"One thing you can't recycle is wasted time."
-Anon.
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"With time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown."
-Chinese Proverb
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"Time goes by so fast, people go in and out of your life. You must never miss the opportunity to tell these people how much they mean to you."
no source for this, even a website dedicated to Cheers doesn't have it http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/GuidePageServlet/showid-66/epid-14345/
-Anon., attributed to "Cheers"
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We are preoccupied with time. If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are now obsessed with time, we might discover a new meaning in the phrase to live like men.
-Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
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It is all very beautiful and magical here - a quality which cannot be described. You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake into you. The skies and the lands are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite that wherever you are you are isolated into a glowing world between the macro and the micro, where everything is sidewise under you and over you, and the clocks stopped long ago.
-Ansel Adams, from A Letter to Alfred Stieglitz from Abiquiu, New Mexico., September 21, 1937
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Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence -- neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish -- it is an imponderably valuable gift.
-Maya Angelou
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For a man can lose neither the past nor the future; for how can one take from him that which is not his? So remember these two points: first, that each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle, and that it signifies not whether a man shall look upon the same things for a hundred years or two hundred, or for an infinity of time; second, that the longest lived and the shortest lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
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Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.
-Marcus Aurelius
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The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.
-Richard Bach
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It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future, and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.
-Jim Bishop, "[comment in the NY Journal-American]", May 7, 1961
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Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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A watch can only tell us how much time it is, how much time has passed, or how much time must still pass before something will occur. These statements are related not to time itself but only to its measurement or calculation.
-Medard Boss
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The illuminable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing oceantide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb, for we have no word to speak about it.
-Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 1841
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There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time."
-Coco Chanel
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Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past even while we attempt to define it, and, like the flash of lightning, at once exists and expires.
-Charles Caleb Colton
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Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time: and not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but temporal affections, not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time.
-Meister Eckhart
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"If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum."
-Sir Arthur Eddington, "In the Nature of the Physical World", 1928
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"The roses under my window make no reference to former roses or better ones; they are what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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…when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
-William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
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"You may delay, but time will not."
-Benjamin Franklin
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Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing Gold can stay.
-Robert Frost
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Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!
-Paul Gauguin
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"Time has been transformed, and we have changed; it has advanced and set us in motion; it has unveiled its face, inspiring us with bewilderment and exhilaration."
-Kahlil Gibran, "Children of Gods, Scions of Apes"
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Believe me when I tell you that thrift of time will repay you in after life, with a usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams; and that waste of it will make you dwindle, alike in intellectual and moral stature, beyond your darkest reckoning.
-William Ewart Gladstone, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone by John Morley
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This required abandoning the idea that there is a universal quantity called time that all clocks measure. Instead, everyone would have his own personal time. The clocks of two people would agree if they were at rest with respect to each other but not if they were moving. This has been confirmed by a number of experiments, including one in which an extremely accurate timepiece was flown around the world and then compared with one that had stayed in place. If you wanted to live longer, you could keep flying to the east so the speed of the plane added to the earth’s rotation. However, the tiny fraction of a second you gained would be more than offset by airline meals.
-Stephen Hawking
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"Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life."
-Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
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There is a place where time stands still.
...illuminated by only the most feeble red light, for light is diminished to almost nothing at the center of time, its vibrations slowed to echoes in vast canyons, its intensity reduced to the faint glow of fireflies.
-Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams
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Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered for they are gone forever.
-Horace Mann
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Time has no division to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire pistols.
-Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
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Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery, faithless, a pixy wife. Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment.
-Thomas Mann, The Beloved Returns, 1939
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Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
-Groucho Marx
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For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
-Marshall McLuhan
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We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own.
-Blaise Pascal
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"Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it. Or something. I dunno, I was only half listening. Becca said it, anyway. Ask her."
[http://www.beliefnet.com/story/159/story_15928_1.html]
-M Scott Peck
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They are all parts of time, and the past and future are created species of time, which we unconsciously but wrongly transfer to the eternal essence; for we say that he "was," he "is," he "will be," but the truth is that "is" alone is properly attributed to him, and that "was" and "will be" only to be spoken of becoming in time, for they are motions, but that which is immovably the same cannot become older or younger by time, nor ever did or has become, or hereafter will be, older or younger, nor is subject at all to any of those states which affect moving and sensible things and of which generation is the cause. These are the forms of time, which imitates eternity and revolves according to a law of number. Moreover, when we say that what has become is become and what becomes is becoming, and that what will become is about to become and that the non-existent is non-existent-all these are inaccurate modes of expression...
-Plato, Timaeus (Translated by Benjamin Jowett), 360
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One by one the sands are flowing,
One by one the moments fall;
Some are coming, some are going;
Do not strive to grasp them all.
-Adelaide Proctor
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Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
-Auguste Rodin
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Imagine that I am riding a bicycle toward you. As I approach an intersection I nearly collide, so it seems to me, with a horsedrawn cart. I swerve and barely avoid being run over. Now think of the event again, and imagine that the cart and the bicycle are both traveling close to the speed of light. If you are standing down the road, the cart is traveling at right angles to your light of sight. You see me, by reflected sunlight, traveling toward you. Would not my speed be added to the speed of light so that my image would get to you considerably before the image of the cart? Should you not see me swerve before you see the cart arrive? Can the cart and I approach the intersection simultaneously from my point of view, but not from yours? Could I experience a near collision with the cart while you perhaps see me swerve around nothing and pedal cheerfully on toward the town of Vinci? These are curious and subtle questions. They challenge the obvious. There is a reason that no one thought of them before Einstein. From such elementary questions, Einstein produced a fundamental rethinking of the world, a revolution in physics.
-Carl Sagan, Cosmos. (New York: Ballantine, 1980), 166-167.
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Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
-Carl Sandburg
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My pipe is out, my glass is dry;
My fire is almost ashes too;
But once again, before you go,
And I prepare to meet the New;
Old Year! a parting word that's true,
For we've been comrades, you and I--
I thank God for each day of you;
There! bless you now! Old Year, good-bye!
-Robert William Service, The Passing of the Year
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Ha, ha! keep time: how sour sweet music is,
When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men's lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To cheque time broke in a disorder'd string;
But for the concord of my state and time
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.
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.
http://www.online-literature.com/shakespeare/richardII/19/
-William Shakespeare, King Richard II Act V Scene V
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"Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough."
-George Bernard Shaw
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Time: that which man is always trying to kill, ends in killing him.
-Herbert Spencer
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Time is not a line, but a series of now-points.
-Taisen Deshimaru
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If there is a symbol of our age, perhaps it is something that every factory worker does each day of their working lives -- I refer to clocking in. (Very soon probably they won't even have to do that; the clock will itself observe them by radar.) In the ancient world when a person entered a temple, each made a votive offering to a god or a goddess at the door. As twentieth century people file into their shrines, they obediently pay their due to the god that regulates their lives -- the clock. It is the clock that measures us, that silent witness that keeps our going in and our coming out and relentlessly records our every movement. That is where all our organization and machinery to free us from time, to save us time, has brought us. Never before have we had such control over things, and never before have we been so enslaved by them. And of nothing is this more true than of time.
-Evelyn Underhill, The Mastery of Time
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"The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be."
-Paul Ambroise Valery
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Time is too slow for those who wait
too swift for those who fear
too long for those who grieve,
too short for those who rejoice,
but for those who love, time is eternity.
Hours fly, flowers die,
new days, new ways pass by,
Love stays.
-Henry Van Dyke, Katrina's Sun Dial
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Time bears away all things, even the mind.
-Virgil, Eclogues, Book IX, Line 51.
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Time is the most precious element of human existence. The successful person knows how to put energy into time and how to draw success from time.
-Denis Waitley
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Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can't buy more hours. Scientists can't invent new minutes. And you can't save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you've wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.
-Denis Waitley
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Between too early and too late, there is never more than a moment.
-Franz Werfel
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It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.
-Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day" Harper & Row 67
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Here is the same clock that walked quietly
Through those enormous years I half recall,
When between one blue summer and another
Time seemed as many miles as round the world,
And world a day, a moment or a mile,
Or a sweet slope of grass edged with the sea,
Or a new song to sing, or a tree dressed in gold –
Time and the world that faster spin until,
Mind cannot grasp them now or heart take hold.
Only the sound of the clock is still the same.
Each of us followed it to a different hour
that like a bushranger held its guns on us
and forced our choice. And the clock begins to race.
We are caught in the endless circle of time and star
That never chime with the blood; we weary; we grow lame,
Stumbling after their incessant pace
That slackens for us only when we are
Caught deep in sleep, or music, or a lover’s face.
-Judith Wright, The Moving Image, 1946
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"There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man's whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue."
-Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure
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"Procrastination is the thief of time."
note: this line also appears in Charles Dickens' David Copperfield.
-Edward Young, Night Thoughts. (in Night i. Line 393), 1742
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Books about Time
