Quotes about time
page 52

Nicholas Sparks photo
Henry David Thoreau photo
Billy Graham photo

“Many invest wisely in business matters, but fail to invest time and interest in their most valued possessions: their spouses and children.”

Billy Graham (1918–2018) American Christian evangelist

Source: Nearing Home: Life, Faith, and Finishing Well

David Levithan photo
Sarah Dessen photo
Robert Jordan photo

“If the world is ending, a woman will want time to fix her hair. If the world's ending, a woman will take time to to tell a man something he's done wrong.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Matrim Cauthon
(15 October 1994)
Source: The Wheel of time series by Robert Jordan

Max Ernst photo

“Max Ernst died the 1st of August 1914. He resuscitated the 11th of November 1918 as a young man aspiring to become a magician and to find the myth of his time.”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

Quote in 'Some Data on the Youth of M. E., As Told by Himself' in the w:View (April 1942); also cited in Max Ernst and Alchemy (2001) by M. E. Warlick, p. 17
Max Ernst refers to his serving-period on the Western and then on the Eastern front during World War 1 (1914-1918)
1936 - 1950

“Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

David Levithan photo
Karen Marie Moning photo

“Yesterday is skin on snake, to be shed many times.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Beyond The Highland Mist

Jennifer Donnelly photo
Robin S. Sharma photo
Mindy Kaling photo
Richelle Mead photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Marlon Brando photo
Eric Jerome Dickey photo

“early is on time, on time is late, and late is unacceptable!”

Eric Jerome Dickey (1961) American author

Source: Sleeping with Strangers

Sydney Smith photo
Jeanne Birdsall photo
Markus Zusak photo
Andy Andrews photo

“I will not waste time on second thoughts. My life will not be an apology. It will be a statement.”

Andy Andrews (1959) author and corporate speaker

Source: The Traveler's Gift: Seven Decisions that Determine Personal Success

A. Lee Martinez photo
Philip Reeve photo
Derek Landy photo
Maureen Johnson photo
William Gibson photo

“She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it.”

William Gibson (1948) American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist and founder of the cyberpunk subgenre
Victor Hugo photo

“There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Often attributed to Hugo as a paraphrase of a similar idea in his Histore d'un Crime (1877): "One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas", the wording of this famous statement actually more closely resembles a passage from the relatively obscure Les Francs-Tireurs (1861) by Gustave Aimard, p. 68 https://books.google.com/books/about/Les_francs_tireurs.html?id=mKI4AQAAIAAJ:
Il y a quelque chose de plus puissant que la force brutale des baïonnettes: c'est l'idée dont le temps est venu et l'heure est sonnée.
There is something more powerful than the brute force of bayonets: it is the idea whose time has come and hour struck.
Translated into English as The Freebooters : A Story of the Texan War (1861) https://archive.org/details/freebootersstory00aima, p. 57, Ward & Lock edition
Misattributed
Variant: More powerful than the mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

Cassandra Clare photo

“Every time you almost die, I almost die myself.”

Source: City of Ashes

Harry Truman photo
Harper Lee photo
Jennifer Donnelly photo
Sarah Dessen photo
Diana Gabaldon photo
Cinda Williams Chima photo
Cassandra Clare photo

“Everyone gets the time they get together, and no more.”

Variant: Everyone gets the time they get together, and no more. Maybe we're not so different that way.
Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Karen Marie Moning photo
Rick Riordan photo
Flannery O’Connor photo
Albert Einstein photo

“Creativity is the residue of time wasted.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
Brian Jacques photo
Jonathan Safran Foer photo
Nicholas Sparks photo
Robin Hobb photo

“Sometimes, reaching out and taking someone's hand is the beginning of a journey.

At other times, it is allowing another to take yours.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

Janet Fitch photo
Elizabeth von Arnim photo

“I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow.”

Elizabeth von Arnim (1866–1941) Australian writer

Source: The Solitary Summer

Yann Martel photo
Poppy Z. Brite photo
Marilynne Robinson photo

“Will I get nights of ecstasy?"
"And days. Ecstasy all the time.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Breaks

Jim Morrison photo

“Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth as raven's
claws”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

An American Prayer (1978)
Variant: Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth a raven´s claws…

Rick Riordan photo
Bill Bryson photo
David Gilmour photo

“… the second time you see something is really thetime. You need to know how it ends before you can appreciate how beautifully it's put together from the beginning.”

David Gilmour (1946) guitarist, singer, best known as a member of Pink Floyd

Source: The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son

Paulo Coelho photo

“Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.”

Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 184; this also has been quoted as "What happens once will never happen again. But what happens twice will surely happen a third time."

Cassandra Clare photo
Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
Derek Landy photo
Douglas Adams photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Stephen R. Covey photo

“At some time in your life, you probably had someone believe in you when you didn't believe in yourself.”

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

Antonio Gramsci photo

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) Italian writer, politician, theorist, sociologist and linguist

Loose translation, commonly attributed to Gramsci by Slavoj Žižek, presumably formulation by Žižek (see below).
Presumably a translation from a loose French translation by Gustave Massiah; strict English with cognate terms and glosses:
Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres
The old world is dying, the new world tardy (slow) to appear and in this chiaroscuro (light-dark) surge (emerge) monsters.
“ Mongo Beti, une conscience noire, africaine, universelle http://www.liberationafrique.org/imprimersans.php3?id_article=16&nom_site=Lib%C3%A9ration”, Gustave Massiah, CEDETIM, août 2002 ( archive https://web.archive.org/web/20160304061734/http://www.liberationafrique.org/imprimersans.php3?id_article=16&nom_site=Lib%C3%A9ration, 2016-03-04)
“Mongo Beti, a Black, African, Universal Conscience”, Gustave Massiah, CEDETIM, August 2002
Collected in: Remember Mongo Beti, Ambroise Kom, 2003, p. 149 https://books.google.com/books?id=6YgdAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Le+vieux+monde+se+meurt,+le+nouveau+monde+tarde+%C3%A0+appara%C3%AEtre+et+dans+ce+clair-obscur+surgissent+les+monstres%22.
Original, with literal English translation (see above):
La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati.
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
Similar sentiments are widespread in revolutionary rhetoric; see: No, Žižek did not attribute a Goebbels quote to Gramsci http://thecharnelhouse.org/2015/07/03/no-zizek-did-not-attribute-a-goebbels-quote-to-gramsci/, Ross Wolfe, 2015-07-03
Misattributed
Source: Selections from the Prison Notebooks

Sarah Dessen photo
Cassandra Clare photo

“I have an idea," Simon said. "Remember how before, I was talking about Dungeons and Dragons?"

"Vividly," Jace said. "It was a dark time.”

Variant: Remember how before, I was talking about Dungeons and Dragons?
Vividly, Jace said. It was a dark time.
Source: City of Heavenly Fire

“A great thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.”

"Water", p. 104
Source: Desert Solitaire (1968)

Haruki Murakami photo
Julia Child photo
Richelle Mead photo
Molière photo
Robinson Jeffers photo
David Levithan photo
Milan Kundera photo
David Bowie photo
Sherman Alexie photo
Nicholas Sparks photo

“Talent is the multiplier. The more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield. The time you spend with your best is, quite simply, your most productive time.”

Marcus Buckingham (1966) British writer

Source: First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently

Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
Richelle Mead photo
Evelyn Waugh photo
Thomas Jefferson photo

“Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to a Mr. Hazard (18 February 1791) published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1853), Vol. 2, edited by Henry Augustine Washington, p. 211
1790s
Context: I learn with great satisfaction that you are about committing to the press the valuable historical and State papers you have been so long collecting. Time and accident are committing daily havoc on the originals deposited in our public offices. The late war has done the work of centuries in this business. The last cannot be recovered, but let us save what remains; not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.

Gabriel García Márquez photo