“I am always late on principle, my principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.”
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet
Quotes about timing page 14
“I killed her once and died for her many times”
Ann Brashares book My Name is Memory
Source: My Name Is Memory
“In truth, how much time do any of us really have?”
Lurlene McDaniel (1944) American writer
Source: Telling Christina Goodbye
“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.”
Zig Ziglar (1926–2012) American motivational speaker
“Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.”
May Sarton (1912–1995) American poet, novelist, and memoirist
Raymond Carver book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Source: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow book Voices of the Night
St. 7.
A Psalm of Life (1839)
Source: Voices of the Night
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
Source: Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden
Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations
“Schopenhauer as educator” ("Schopenhauer als Erzieher"), § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 127
Untimely Meditations (1876)
Context: In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience—why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia. … Men are even lazier than they are timid, and fear most of all the inconveniences with which unconditional honesty and nakedness would burden them. Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone’s secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle.
“To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.”
Aaron Copland (1900–1990) American composer, composition teacher, writer, and conductor
Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker
Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 10
Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998) Peruvian-American author
Source: Tales of Power
“Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it’s fear.”
Paul Beatty book The Sellout
Source: The Sellout
Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mrs. Arbuthnot http://books.google.com/books?id=RHkWAAAAYAAJ&q=%22Children+begin+by+loving+their+parents+after+a+time%22+%22they+judge+them+rarely+if+ever+do+they+forgive+them%22&pg=PA187#v=onepage, Act IV <br class="br">A Woman of No Importance (1893) <br class="br">Variant: Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. <br class="br">Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist
Not by Twain, but from Edward Abbey's A Voice Crying In The Wilderness (1989).
Misattributed
Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born
“you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.”
Miles Davis (1926–1991) American jazz musician
“When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him..”
Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist
“I love everything that's old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.”
Oliver Goldsmith book The Vicar of Wakefield
She Stoops to Conquer (1771), Act I
Source: The Vicar of Wakefield
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
Part I: Man and Nature, Ch. 1: Current Perplexities, pp. 4–5
1950s, New Hopes for a Changing World (1951)
Context: Consider MacArthur and his Republican supporters. So limited is his intelligence and his imagination that he is never puzzled for one moment. All we have to do is to go back to the days of the Opium War. After we have killed a sufficient number of millions of Chinese, the survivors among them will perceive our moral superiority and hail MacArthur as a saviour. But let us not be one-sided. Stalin, I should say, is equally simple- minded and equally out of date. He, too, believes that if his armies could occupy Britain and reduce us all to the economic level of Soviet peasants and the political level of convicts, we should hail him as a great deliverer and bless the day when we were freed from the shackles of democracy. One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
“I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.”
Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind
Source: The Shadow of the Wind
Andy Warhol book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Ch. 7: Time
Source: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.”
Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) French Romantic composer
Le temps est un grand maître, dit-on; le malheur est qu'il soit un maître inhumain qui tue ses élèves.
Letter written in November 1856, published in Pierre Citron (ed.) Correspondance générale (Paris: Flammarion, 1989) vol. 5, p. 390; Paul Davies About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) p. 214.
Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
Context: I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, my cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it. (p. 17)
Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary
Source: Let Me be a Woman
“Don't limit a child to your own learning, for she was born in another time.”
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath
“I've now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.”
Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest
Jack, Act III
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer
Source: The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928
“The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.”
Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter
“The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.”
Marcus Aurelius book Meditations
Source: Meditations
Orhan Pamuk (1952) Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literature recipient
Source: My Name is Red
“My memory loves you… it asks about you all the time.”
Jonathan Carroll (1949) novelist, short story writer
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet
Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894)
Source: Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
Brenda Ueland (1891–1985) Journalist and writer
Source: If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
“These are the times that try men's souls.”
Thomas Paine book The American Crisis
Source: The American Crisis
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist
Source: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
Patricia Briggs (1965) American writer
Source: Masques
“Strength enough to build a home,
Time enough to hold a child,
Love enough to break a heart”
Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author
Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes
Simon and Jace. pg. 139
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)
Alberto Moravia (1907–1990) Italian writer and journalist
Un male incerto provoca inquietudine, perché, in fondo, si spera fino all'ultimo che non sia vero; ma un male sicuro, invece, infonde per qualche tempo una squallida tranquillità.
Source: Il Disprezzo (Milano: Bompiani, 1954) p. 77; Angus Davidson (trans.) Contempt (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005) p. 75.
Barbara Bush (1925–2018) former First Lady of the United States
Source: Reflections: Life After the White House
Rainer Maria Rilke book The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Source: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
“He who has nothing—it has been said many times—has nothing to lose but his chains.”
Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet
“As large as worlds. As old as Time. As patient as a brick.”
Terry Pratchett book The Light Fantastic
Source: The Light Fantastic
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
Source: Selected Letters