Best 236 quotes in «time passing quotes» category

I am old enough to know that time passing is just a trick, a convenience. Everything is always there, still unfolding, still happening. The past, the present, and the future, in the noggin eternally, like brushes, combs and ribbons in a handbag.

The best thing about time passing is the privilege of running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and everyone I know.

Time, as is well known, sometimes flies like a bird and sometimes crawls like a worm, but human beings are generally particularly happy when they don't notice whether it's passing quickly or slowly.

There are some moments you'd rather sleep through, pass from point A to point B without awareness of the time passing or the events that carry you from present to future. And it's mostly those moments in which it's smarter-safer- to stay awake.

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.

Ah, how quickly the hands on the clock circle toward the future we thought was far away! And how soon we become our mothers.

David Park is a physicist and philosopher at Williams College in Massachusetts with a lifelong interest in a time which he too thinks doesn't pass. For Park, the passage of time is not so much an illusion as a myth, "because it involves no deception of the senses.... One cannot perform any experiment to tell unambiguously whether time passes or not." This is certainly a telling argument. After all, what reality can be attached to a phenomenon that can never be demonstrated experimentally? In fact, it is not even clear how to think about demonstrating the flow of time experimentally. As the apparatus, laboratory, experimenter, technicians, humanity generally and the universe as a whole are apparently caught up in the same inescapable flow, how can any bit of the universe be "stopped in time" in order to register the flow going on in the rest of it? It is analogous to claiming that the whole universe is moving through space at the same speed—or, to make the analogy closer, that space is moving through space. How can such a claim ever be tested?

All human progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future.

And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one by one, from the trees. At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and twenty, until the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs in the soft, darkening grass, and you are the last apple on the tree; and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from your hold upon the sky, and drop you down and down. Long before you hit the grass you will have forgotten there ever was a tree, or other apples, or a summer, or green grass below, You will fall in darkness...

As soon as you wink, you close your eyes to reality.

A time past is an essence gone

At the end of your life's journey, what do you want to say you did with your time? There is enough time if you choose to invest it in yourself. Inch by inch, day by day . . . make yourself a priority.

At the end of the day all we ever need is something that helped pass the time and something that keeps time from passing.

But however minimal, however threadbare, it (collective memory) is ballast of a kind. We all need that seven-eighths of the iceberg, the ballast of the past, a general past, the place from which we came. That is why history should be taught in school. to all children, as much of it as possible. If you have no sense of the past, no access to historical narrative, you are afloat, untethered; you cannot see yourself as a part of the narrative, you cannot place yourself within a context. You will not have an understanding of time, and a respect for memory and its subtle victory over the remorselessness of time.

By and by we shall say goodbye

can I ask you a simple but complex question? Why are you still alive and living?

Dare to keep moving when it is a must and there to keep waiting when you have to, but note, you shall always keep waiting if you keep waiting and you shall always keep moving when you keep moving!

Don't waste time with people who waste time. Time is precious, fragile as a butterfly wing, meaningful as an orgasm.

Do we kill time, or does time ultimately kill us?

Do you invest your time or spend it?

Enjoying Life’s Pace: Waiting really shouldn’t be an occupation…things will happen when they happen and not one minute sooner. That is the way of life; it runs at its own pace. Enjoy as many minutes as you can.

Espero que en algún lugar haya otro ser humano que haya sentido alguna vez lo que estoy sintiendo ahora... y también espero que este ser humano no esté encerrado en La Castañeda o en el San Bernardino.

Even at 80, I shall say that I am yet to start, Yes! I shall say that I am yet to start, for that shall give me the real reason never ever to look back and see what I have done but, to look ahead and see the marvelous things I shall be able to do and the distinctive footprints I shall be able live and leave with the very seconds that shall be ahead of me! Life must never be over until all is over!

Everything passes, but nothing entirely goes away.

Everything turns slower when she’s not around, but when she’s with me, an hour feels like a blink of an eye.

Excerpt: Paradox – Bound By Blood. The hands on a clock never falter, not for a second. One day ends; and a new begins. If there was one thing on this earth that could be counted on, it was that. Time never paused to mourn the dead. That particular privilege is allotted to the living. It is for the survivor to mourn, bury the dead, and leave the rest to the earth. That is the way of it – the way of death - and the misery it leaves behind.

From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered, I learned that time cannot be spent, It only can be squandered.

Go for it because for all those moments that you would make up your mind the other might have already rushed for it.

He wrote all the time except during those late-afternoon hours between night and day when he didn't know what to do with himself. When work was over and the evening hadn't yet begun. He saw people going about their business, on their way home on the streetcars, walking with the evening newspaper in their hands. He looked at the dull gray of the city as it settled to dark, the clatter of dishes, children's heads bent over books, cooking smells -- chicken, stews, soups -- drifting into the street. It was in the pauses, in the space between notes, in the slips and breaks, a kind of slow steady interval as if one thing could lead to the next. As if you could go to sleep and wake up and it would be a new day and somehow things would be different than they'd been before. But Benny knew otherwise. Life didn't get better as it went along. It got narrower as if you were walking through a tunnel that was closing in on you, toward a distant beam of light that kept receding. Life got slower and the pauses got longer. Benny didn't mind the day when he was busy, and he waited for the night when he'd go somewhere and listen or play if they let him. It was the in-between time when he felt lost.

How can you waste time? You have only so much to use, and no matter what you do, it still passes.

I am constantly mystified by what John ends up remembering… I just don’t understand why he’s able to hang on to information like that, while so many other more important memories evaporate. Then again, I suppose so much of what stays with us is often insignificant. The memories we take to the ends of our lives have no real rhyme or reason, especially when you think of the endless things that you do over the course of a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime. All the cups of coffee, hand-washings, changes of clothes, lunches, goings to the bathroom, headaches, naps, walks to school, trips to the grocery store, conversations about the weather—all the things so unimportant they should be immediately forgotten. Yet they aren’t. I often think of the Chinese red bathrobe I had when I was twenty-seven years old; the sound of our first cat Charlie’s feet on the linoleum of our old house; the hot rarefied air around aluminum pot the moment before the kernels of popcorn burst open. I think of these things as often as I think about getting married or giving birth or the end of the Second World War. What is truly amazing is that before you know it, sixty years go by and you can remember maybe eight or nine important events, along with a thousand meaningless ones. How can that be? You want to think there’s a pattern to it all because it makes you feel better, gives you some sense of a reason why we’re here, but there really isn’t any. People look for God in these patterns, these reasons, but only because they don’t know where else to look. Things happen to us: some of it important, most of it not, and a little of it stays with us till the end. What stays after that? I’ll be damned if I know. (pp.174-175)

I am old and all I have left is time. I don't mean time to live; I mean free time. Time to fill. Time to kill until time kills me. I walk and walk and think and think.

I am struck by what a tawdry magician’s trick Time is after all. I am sixty-six years old. Viewed from your coign of vantage—facing toward the future—sixty-six years is a great deal of time. It is all of the experience of your life more than three times over. But, viewed from my coign of vantage—facing toward the past—this sixty-six years was the fluttering down of a cherry petal. I feel that my life was a picture hastily sketched but never filled in . . . for lack of time. Only yesterday—but more than fifty years ago—I walked along this river with my father. I can remember how big and strong his hand felt to my small fingers. Fifty years. But all the insignificant, busy things—the terribly important, now forgotten things that cluttered the intervening time collapse and fall away from my memory. And I remember another yesterday when my daughter was a little girl. We walked along here. At this very moment, the nerves in my hand remember the feeling of her chubby fingers clinging to one of mine.

If time waits for no one then let me show you how it does, by smash your watch.

If we seek for the best times to act, we may miss some opportunities. We must seize the moment and make it great.

If you travel in space for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense.

I have learned how to make time pass, but I never stop thinking of you.

In a way, a garden is the most useless of creations, the most slippery of creations: it is not like a painting or a piece of sculpture—it won’t accrue value as time goes on. Time is its enemy’ time passing is merely the countdown for the parting between garden and gardener.

In today's life, Luxury is Time and Space.

All that crap about time being a great healer is bullshit. Time heals nothing. Well, acne maybe.

All things are made beautiful at a timely hour.

Although we try to control it in a million different ways, the only things you can ever really do to time are enjoy it, or waste it. That’s it.

A new day is here! yesterday is gone! tomorrow is preparing to come! but why is today here?

Because time does the job, dynamite can't touch. (Samuel Hamilton)

Be them good times, Be them bad times, I swear to you They never last!

Sana: – Tanto 2 o 3 mesi passano in fretta! Mamma: – (narrando) Si separano tranquillamente, dicendosi che due o tre mesi passeranno in fretta… Ma quei bambini non sanno… …che per loro il tempo scorre moooolto più lentamente che per gli adulti.

But even in this card, as in all cards: transience. The faces in the crowd — faces that will watch the every move of the lordly All-Star in the foreground — have been blurred to something like Monet’s lily pads, those hypnotic omens of the inevitable dusk into which we’ll all dissolve. All names, even those of the greatest among us, will eventually unravel to silence.

But until this night, she had never once actually wet the bed. And now that she has, we just lie there in the accident, and the minutes of the clock keep changing, and the love I have for her keeps growing, and we both keep drawing breath. What was so horrible about it? Why had I always been so angry? What was my need to always be right? To win every argument with her? To out-stubborn a dog? And just like that, all the anger is gone. Released like the emptying of a bladder into soft cotton sheets as we lie in the wetness.

children spend their time for they think they have more time; adults cry over their time for they see they have less time

Dare to keep moving when it is a must and dare to keep waiting when you have to, but note, you shall always keep waiting if you keep waiting and you shall always keep moving when you keep moving!