Quotes about minute

Variant: You can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks or even months over-analyzing a situation; trying to put the pieces together, justifying what could've, would've happened... or you can just leave the pieces on the floor and move the f**k on.

As quoted in The Wilson Era; Years of War and After, 1917–1923 (1946) by Josephus Daniels, p. 624. Referenced in "Bartleby.com" http://www.bartleby.com/73/1288.html
1920s and later

Misattributed to Meryl Streep (and widely disseminated on the Internet as of August/September 2014), this quote is allegedly a translation of a text by the author José Micard Teixeira, the original of which begins (in Portuguese): "Já não tenho paciência para algumas coisas, não porque me tenha tornado arrogante..."
Misattributed

As quoted in New Musical Express (1991-11-23).
Interviews (1989-1994), Print

Commonly attributed to Barnum, there is much testimony of contemporaries that he never actually said this, and in "P. T. Barnum Never Did Say "There's a Sucker Born Every Minute" http://www.historybuff.com/library/refbarnum.html R. J. Brown asserts that it actually originated with a banker named David Hannum, in reference to one of Barnum's hoaxes: a replica of the Cardiff Giant.
Misattributed

According to R. Ken Rasmussen in The Quotable Mark Twain (1998), this is most probably not Twain's.
Misattributed

Source: The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

September 30, 1974. South Bend, IN. Notre Dame Ath Center.
Source: http://www.elvisconcerts.com/real/oct74-01.htm
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEZpSFnDxRg

The Conferences V.2 ( online http://books.google.com/books?id=k3CrvJJZkqEC&pg=PA44)

The Clockmaker (1836); comparable to "Remember that time is money" in "Advice to a Young Tradesman" (1748) by Benjamin Franklin

Reported in Ned Sherrin, Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations (2008), p. 153.

The Power of Now (1997)

Das Wesen der Materie [The Nature of Matter], a 1944 speech in Florence, Italy, Archiv zur Geschichte der Max‑ Planck‑ Gesellschaft, Abt. Va, Rep. 11 Planck, Nr. 1797; the German original is as quoted in The Spontaneous Healing of Belief https://archive.org/stream/GreggBradenTheSpontaneousHealingOfBelief/Gregg%20Braden/Gregg%20Braden%20-%20The%20Spontaneous%20Healing%20Of%20Belief#page/n1 (2008) by Gregg Braden, p. 212; Braden mistranslates intelligenten Geist as "intelligent Mind", which is an obvious tautology.

30 December 1850
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries
Context: Each bud flowers but once and each flower has but its minute of perfect beauty; so, in the garden of the soul each feeling has, as it were, its flowering instant, its one and only moment of expansive grace and radiant kingship. Each star passes but once in the night through the meridian over our heads and shines there but an instant; so, in the heaven of the mind each thought touches its zenith but once, and in that moment all its brilliancy and all its greatness culminate. Artist, poet, or thinker, if you want to fix and immortalize your ideas or your feelings, seize them at this precise and fleeting moment, for it is their highest point. Before it, you have but vague outlines or dim presentiments of them. After it you will have only weakened reminiscence or powerless regret; that moment is the moment of your ideal.

Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
Sourced from newspapers and magazines
Context: Just sitting silently for a few minutes within the sphere of Dhyanalinga is enough to make even those unaware of meditation experience a state of deep meditativeness. - Sadhguru (on the Dhyanalinga meditation shrine at Isha Yoga Centre, India)

"Belief & Technique For Modern Prose: List of Essentials" in a letter to Arabelle Porter (28 May 1955); published in Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1940-1956 (1995). Sometimes misquoted as "Be in love with your life every minute of it."
Variant: Be in love with your life every detail of it

"Emily Webb"
Our Town (1938)
Context: I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back — up the hill — to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by Grover's Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking... and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths... and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.... Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? — Every, every minute?... I'm ready to go back... I should have listened to you. That's all human beings are! Just blind people.

Source: Pale Fire

Context: It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.

Source: Our Town

Remarks at National Action Network headquarters (9 July 2002)

2
Les Caractères (1688), De la société et de la conversation

My Twisted World (2014), 19-22, UC Santa Barbara, Building to Violence

other version: One minute can decide the outcome of the battle, one hour - the outcome of the campaign, and one day - the fate of the country.
"Encyclopedia of Russian History" - Page 1504 by James R. Millar - Soviet Union - 2004.

A desert blessing, an ocean curse. What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers."
Augustus "Gus" Waters, p. 310-313
The Fault in Our Stars (2012)

To M——— (1829), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Paris Review (Summer 1966)
Context: Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, "What do you do?" And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day.

Ante-Nicene Christian library: v. 3 p. 20
Address to the Greeks

Source: The Bridge on the Drina (1945), Ch. 22

Source: "A Hanging", in The Adelphi (August 1931)

Source: Hell

Biff
Source: Death of a Salesman (1949)

Source: The Angel's Game

Source: Lords and Ladies

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
Context: Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all: —
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.

Source: The Merry Wives of Windsor

Source: Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

Source: The Rape of Lucrece

Source: The Glass Menagerie

Source: Dance Dance Dance

Variant: Heroes may not be braver than anyone else. They're just braver five minutes longer.

Source: My Friend Leonard

"What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us?" (1897)

Source: Moving Pictures

Source: The Republic of Love

Source: Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman's Soul

Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014 (2014)
Source: Away from Her

Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Source: Himalayan Lust

Source: The Slow Regard of Silent Things

Source: The Gun Seller (1996)

Source: Wife 22

Source: Orlando

Source: Madame Bovary

Variant: If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster. Časopis LIFE, január 1984

Source: Hogfather

Source: The Great Gatsby

Source: My Man Jeeves

Source: The Pale King

Source: Requiem for a Dream

Source: Through the Zombie Glass

Source: Thief of Time

A Means for Furthering Peace (1905)

New York Times (12 July 2003) "AFTER THE WAR; Hussein's Perennial Optimist Reappears"

Bernard on Percival, section V
The Waves (1931)

the Professor exclaimed with enthusiasm. "Black Light, and Nothing, look so extremely alike, at first sight, that I don't wonder he failed to distinguish them! We will now proceed to the Third Experiment."</p>
Source: Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), Chapter 21: The Professor's Lecture

"Apollo and the Fates", line 210 (1887).