Time Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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.

No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his body, to risk his well-being, to risk his life, in a great cause.

Theodore Roosevelt

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

Of the French Revolution

Charles Dickens

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Edgar Allan Poe

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

While it is well enough to leave footprints on the sands of time, it is even more important to make sure they point in a commendable direction.

James Branch Cabell

There are periods in history when change is necessary, and other periods when it is better to keep everything for the time as it is. The art of life is to be in the rhythm of your age.

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.

Gay and straight men have much more in common than do gay men with lesbians or straight men with straight women. Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he he just falls back into her and is swallowed up. This is the agonizing myth-pattern in the comic, matricidal Psycho (1960), one of the hauntingly emblematic films of our time.

The Union, which can alone insure internal peace, and external security to each State, Must and Shall be Preserved, cost what it may in time, treasure, and blood.

George B. McClellan

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

Richard Dawkins

The fact that a player is very short of time is, to my mind, as little to be considered as an excuse as, for instance, the statement of the law-breaker that he was drunk at the moment he committed the crime.

Alexander Alekhine

When you cease from labour, fill up your time in reading, meditation, and prayer: and while your hands are labouring, let your heart be employed, as much as possible, in divine thoughts.