“For tyme y-lost may not recovered be.”
Book 4, line 1283
Troilus and Criseyde (1380s)
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Geoffrey Chaucer 99
English poet 1343–1400Related quotes

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 237.

“For thogh we slepe, or wake, or rome, or ryde,
Ay fleeth the tyme; it nyl no man abyde.”
The Clerk's Tale, l. 62-63
The Canterbury Tales

Sententiæ: The Citizen and the State
1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Source: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

Said to Samuel J Woolf, Berlin, Summer 1929. Cited with additional notes in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice and Freeman Dyson, Princeton UP (2010) p 230
1920s
Variant: If A is success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.