Time Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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.

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

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?

What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion?... The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Thomas Jefferson

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

Johannes Kepler

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

Edgar Allan Poe

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Time will inevitably uncover dishonesty and lies; history has no place for them.

Norodom Sihanouk

China has The Bomb. [...] Sometime in the future—25, 50, 75 years hence—what will the situation be like then? By that time the Chinese will have the capability of delivery too. That's the reason some schools of thinking don't rule out a destruction of the Chinese military potential before the situation grows worse than it is today. It's bad enough now.

In the middle of August I did not consider that the time had come for us to despair of a successful conclusion of the war. In spite of certain distressing but isolated occurrences in the last battle, I certainly hoped that the Army would be in a position to continue to hold out. I fully realised what the homeland had already borne in the way of sacrifices and privations and what they would possibly still have to bear.

Paul von Hindenburg

From time immemorial, man has desired to comprehend the complexity of nature in terms of as few elementary concepts as possible.

Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.

Natalie Clifford Barney

A powerful attraction exists, therefore, to the promotion of a study and of duties of all others engrossing the time most completely, and which is less benefited than most others by any acquaintance with science.

Charles Babbage

I believe that everything has its own season, and each hour its law. If something anticipated arrives too late it finds us numb, wrung out from waiting, and we feel — nothing at all. The best things arrive on time.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.