Time Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?

The product of mental labor — science — always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige and even his life for the welfare of others.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Give us back our suffering, we cry to Heaven in our hearts — suffering rather than indifferentism; for out of nothing comes nothing. But out of suffering may come the cure. Better have pain than paralysis! A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. But rather, ten times rather, die in the surf, heralding the way to that new world, than stand idly on the shore!

Florence Nightingale

And thus they give the time, that Nature meant for peaceful sleep and meditative snores, to ceaseless din and mindless merriment and waste of shoes and floors.

Humans are amphibians — half spirit and half animal.... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

Balance your thoughts with action. — If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

Edgar Allan Poe

One of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.

Simone de Beauvoir

I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short.

Variant translation: I have made this one [letter] longer than usual because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter.

But Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: "Stay, thou art so fair." And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.

John F. Kennedy

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.

Johannes Kepler

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

I certainly feel that the time is not far distant when a knowledge of the principles of diet will be an essential part of one's education. Then mankind will eat to live, be able to do better mental and physical work, and disease will be less frequent.

Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end: we fancy that we have always possessed what we love, so difficult is it to imagine how we could have lived without it.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël

The first sentence of every novel should be: 'Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.' Meander if you want to get to town.

Michael Ondaatje

At one of the annual conventions of the American Society for Aesthetics much confusion arose when the Society for Anesthetics met at the same time in the same hotel.

In the history of physics, every time we've looked beyond the scales and energies we were familiar with, we've found things that we wouldn't have thought were there. You look inside the atom and eventually you discover quarks. Who would have thought that? It's hubris to think that the way we see things is everything there is.

A healthy human environment is one in which we try to make sense of our limits, of the accidents that can always befall us and the passage of time which inexorably changes us.

Few people wear out before their time. Mostly they rust out, worry out, run out - spill out. A machine must have care and its different parts must be adjusted properly. No machine has ever approached the human machine. When it is right, it is in health.

George Matthew Adams

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.