Quotes about hourglass (11 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

Birthday , Life

“The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!’ If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “do you want this once more and innumerable times more?””

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?.
Sec. 341
The Gay Science (1882)

Life , God , Pain , Lie

“Dude, the place is filling up," I say. "It feels like we're living in the bottom half of an hourglass."
Like somehow we're running out of time.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Choke

Source: Choke

Feeling , Time

“I don't know, there's something about you. Say there's an hourglass: the sand's about to run out. Someone like you can always be counted on to turn the thing over.”

Haruki Murakami book A Wild Sheep Chase

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982), Chapter 2: Sixteen Steps

“One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.

In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Hope , Personality , Dead

“All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do so, would I?”

Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907) American poet, novelist, editor

Leaves From a Notebook, Ponkapog Papers (1903) p. 29.

Life

“It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Evaristo Carriego: A Book About Old-Time Buenos Aires

Evaristo Carriego (1930) Ch. 3

Books , Art , Parting

“A physician can sometimes parry the scythe of death, but has no power over the sand in the hourglass.”

Hester Thrale (1741–1821) Welsh author and salon-holder

Letter to Fanny Burney, November 12, 1781; Charlotte Barrett (ed.) Diary and Letters of Madame d'Arblay (1854) vol. 2, p. 82.

Death

“life is
only
as good as the memories we makeSo long astoria
i found a map to buried treasure
and even if we come home empty handed
well still have our stories
of battle scars, pirate ships and wounded hearts,
broken bones, and all the best of friendshipsand when this hourglass
has filtered out
its final grain of sand
i raise my glass to the memories we had
this is my wish
this is my wish
im takin back
im takin them all back”

Kris Roe (1978) American composer and singer

Song lyrics, So Long, Astoria (2003)

Life , Home , Memory , Heart

“It lay heavily in her hands, the crystal face gleaming, the golden body exquisitely machined. It was very like a clock, or a compass, for there were hands pointing to places around the dial, but instead of the hours or the points of the compass there were several little pictures, each of them painted with extraordinary precision, as if on ivory with the finest and slenderest sable brush. She turned the dial around to look at them all. There was an anchor; an hourglass surmounted by a skull; a chameleon, a bull, a beehive… Thirty-six altogether, and she couldn't even guess what they meant.”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

Lyra, investigating the alethiometer, in Ch. 4 : The Alethiometer
His Dark Materials, The Golden Compass (1995)

Painting

“Time passed, slipping through the waist of the universe's great hourglass like the eroded soil of this continent slipping down her rivers to the seas.”

Gene Wolfe book The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories

"Seven American Nights", Orbit 20 (1978), ed. Damon Knight, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (1980), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009)
Fiction

Universe , Time , Sea