Quotes About Time

Consider the word “time.” We use so many phrases with it. Pass time. Waste time. Kill time. Lose time. In good time. About time. Take your time. Save time. A long time. Right on time. Out of time. Mind the time. Be on time. Spare time. Keep time. Stall for time. There are as many expressions with “time” as there are minutes in a day. But once, there was no word for it at all. Because no one was counting. Then Dor began. And everything changed.

The same costume will be Indecent ten years before its time, Shameless five years before its time, Outre (daring) one year before its time, Smart (in its own time), Dowdy one year after its time, Ridiculous twenty years after its time, Amusing thirty years after its time, Quaint fifty years after its time, Charming seventy years after its time, Romantic one-hundred years after its time, Beautiful one-hundred-and-fifty years after its time.

Time is the most valuable thing on earth: time to think, time to act, time to extend our fraternal relations, time to become better men, time to become better women, time to become better and more independent citizens.

What differentiates time from space is that time does have a direction. In that sense it is different from space. I think that's certainly true that whereas spatial dimensions don't have direction or an arrow, time does. It runs from past to future. But I see that arrow of time as rooted in a deeper metaphysical reality, namely the reality of temporal becoming - of things coming to be and passing away. That is why time has this arrow. But it's not sufficient to simply say that time and space are distinct because time has a direction. The question will be: why does it have a direction?

Time is infinitely more precious than money, and there is nothing common between them. You cannot accumulate time; you cannot borrow time; you can never tell how much time you have left in the Bank of Life. Time is life.

In time the savage bull sustains the yoke; In time all haggard hawks will stoop to lure; In time small wedges cleave the hardest oak, In time the flint is pierced with softest shower, And she in time will fall from her disdain, And rue the sufferance of your friendly pain.

...The unconscious has no time. There is no trouble about time in the unconscious. Part of our psyche is not in time and not in space. They are only an illusion, time and space, and so in a certain part of our psyche time does not exist at all.

Why has time disappeared in our culture? How is it that after decades of inventions and new technologies devoted to saving time and labor, the result is that there is no time left? We are a time-poor society; we are temporally impoverished. And there is no issue, no aspect of human life, that exceeds this in importance. The destruction of time is literally the destruction of life.

The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practiced at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness.

You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don't mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

Chance is the one thing you can't buy. You have to pay for it and you have to pay for it with your life, spending a lot of time, you pay for it with time, not the wasting of time but the spending of time.

Some of the best auditions I've ever had have been when my agent called and said, "They want you 20 minutes ago, in an office in Century City, to see you for something." It's actually sometimes a really good thing. I don't have time to second-guess myself, I don't have time to overthink things, and I don't have time to get bogged down in stuff. I'm not sitting there thinking for a week and a half, before I'm supposed to go in front of a network president to do something. That just gives you time to be nervous.

We are cognizant of time, the sense that there is mutability. Time is change. It's the separation of eternity from itself. When eternity is separated from itself, we see it appear in different forms. Time is not a movement in space. Space is a movement in time.

You plant a garden one flower at a time. ... You write a book one word at a time, clean a closet one shelf at a time, run a marathon one step at a time. If you feel defeated by some large task, get your spade and dig the first hole.

I allude to Back to the Future in the 1985 story to let folks know it was an inspiration and because it literally was the most time-travelly bit of pop culture we had in the mid 80's. I can talk about their tools for considering change. First, the book is metafictive in a traditional sense where I'm showing and telling the reader that the act of writing and reading is a reflexive way to push boundaries of real and literal time travel. Writers and readers are time travellers. The question is what we do with that time we traveled when we leave a book, leave a page.

Memory is therefore, neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present, for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember.

At the end of every year, I add up the time that I have spent on the phone on hold and subtract it from my age. I don't count that time as really living. I spend more and more time on hold each year. By the time I die, I'm going to be quite young.

Everything requires time. It is the only truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.

It is true that it feels very differently to enjoy a good meal, taking part in an interesting conversation, or to think of how successful your children are. Suppose we do all these things at a particular time. How happy are we at the time? We do not need to calculate the value of each such feelings on any singular scale to answer this question. We need not see our happiness at the time as a mathematical function of these items. It is rather that all these experiences, together with many other factors, causally puts us at the time at a certain level of happiness, i.e. in a certain mood.

People ask me all the time what it's like to work with my mother. I feel completely blessed because, first of all, this has given us an opportunity to enrich our relationship in ways we never could have imagined. Our time together is purely creative. It's unfettered by politics or the news of the day or aches and pains or family dramas or anything else. This time together is sort of golden and protected as being just creative time, which is heavenly.

At the heart of world time is the momentum of history. At the heart of personal time is the mystery and wonder of individuality. At the heart of deep, new time is the creative spirit. But at the heart of our time is love.

Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home. It is no season in which to wander the world as if one were the wind blowing aimlessly along the streets without a place to rest, without food, and without time meaning anything to one, just as time means nothing to the wind.

Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.

One of the main problems in families today is that we spend less and less time together.... Time together is precious time-time needed to talk, to listen, to encourage, and to show how to do things.

He that hath time and looks for better time, time comes that he repents himself of time.

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

Successful leaders develop effective strategies for maintaining their boundaries. ... Most time bandits don't know any better. And being a time bandit is a matter of context. One person's time bandit is another person's pleasant diversion. ... Instead of gritting our teeth to be polite and resenting the time bandit for holding us up, the best choice is to be honest. We cannot expect another person to honor our needs unless we affirm them ourselves.

There is a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance.

Without hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

If people want insights, if they want to swim in the currents of their own time and share the experiences of their time, then it makes sense to engage with the artists of one's own time.

Big achievements come one small advantage at a time, one step at a time, one day at time.

There was a time when people would go search out underground records. Now, underground means free, and people don't really care for it. So now artists tend to go more pop and look for the radio. You know, the radio never wanted you to speak about anything, so the music is kinda influenced by the hands of the radio which wants to homogenize it and dilute it and sanitize it. And for the most part, nobody's takin' the time to seek out the cats that are still tryin' to talk, so they have a difficult time being heard, like Chuck D said.

time past is not time gone, it is time accumulated with the host resembling the character in the fairytale who was joined along the route by more and more characters none of whom could be separated from one another or from the host, with some stuck so fast that their presence caused physical pain.

I think there's a growing amount of confusion about what conservatism is. And it is time for us to understand that conservatism is not built on personalities. Conservatism is not simply built on how angry you might seem from time to time. Conservatism is built on a set of principles and ideas that our nation desperately needs.

Oh time...time, pass so that I forget! Oh time, Great Healer, pass over me and let me forget.

No time for drug addiction, no time for smoke or booze. Too strong for a shortened life span, I've got no time to lose.

I'm not alive. People believe memories grow vague, are erased by time, since nothing endures against the passage of time. That's the difference; time does not pass over me, over us. It doesn't erase anything, doesn't undo it. I'm not a live. I died in Auschwitz but no one knows it.

Knowing what you need doesn't always mean you know how to get it, though. I'd spent a long time hiding in my cave. No matter how much I might want to come out into the light, I knew it would hurt my eyes. I was a fool. A fool, but nevertheless too smart not to know I was the architect of my own demise, that it was time to put my past behind me. It was time to stop allowing the white elephants to stand unspoken of in my living room.

Actually I am the one to blame. I was the one who had said that maybe I would be married in two years time. But things are different now and there is still time before I get married. As the saying goes, 'Man proposes, God disposes', every time we make a plan God changes it.

Being raised on a boat felt like it was totally normal to me. I was just another kid hanging out, doing this and that. My girlfriend and I had a funny period of time where I was always wanting to hug her all the time. I looked at my brother and he's the same way. It wasn't that our family was necessarily more affectionate than others. It was that we were basically sitting on top of each other, or side by side squished in together all the time. Because the boat was that small. It became part of our nature to be close to people.

Make time less precious. We are way too efficient, making use of every hour, every minute. When you were a kid, didn’t you just spend hours poking sticks in the mud, climbing trees and sitting in them, looking at shells and seaweed that washed up on the shoreline? Time was not precious then, we weren’t trying to stuff an accomplishment into every minute every day, we had time for thoughts and feelings. That was good!

There is only one time that is important-Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. The most necessary person is the one with whom you are, for no person knows whether he or she will ever have dealings with anyone else: and the most important affair is, to do the person good, because for that purpose alone were human beings sent into this life!

Managers’ typical response to my argument about free time is, ‘That’s all well and good, but there are things I have to do.’ Yet we waste so much time in unproductive activity—it takes an enormous effort on the part of the leader to keep free time for the truly important things.

I'm very interested in stopping time. And starting time. There is that aspect of time that I'm playing with, that it's elusive and unnoticed yet really in the end the most important thing.

Once we have found ourselves, we must understand how from time to time to lose--and then to find--ourselves once again: assuming,that is, that we are thinkers. For a thinker it is a drawback to be bound to a single person all the time.

When you have success on the field, you're more popular and you have that fame that comes with it. You realize you're in the public eye more and you've got to be a little bit more careful about some of the things you're doing out in public and make sure you're smart about the things you say. You're still going to make mistakes from time to time, but you represent an even greater population and people are that much more looking for you to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or fall down or say something really stupid that's going to get you in trouble.

There is a time for everything. There is a time when I sit down, I concentrate myself on the problem of my bills, but I would not worry before that. One thing at a time.

I've been lonely for so long. And I've been hurt so deeply. If only I could have met you again a long time ago, then I wouldn't have had to take all these detours to get here.' Tengo shook his head. 'I don't think so. This way is just fine. This is exactly the right time. For both of us. [...] We needed that much time.... to understand how lonely we really were.