“We must remember that the future is neither wholly ours nor wholly not ours, so that neither must we count upon it as quite certain to come nor despair of it as quite certain not to come.”
Epicurus · Letter to Menoeceus
Category
← Back to top
Time Quotes
62 quotes on time and how we spend it — from the classics to the everyday.
“Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren't built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle.”
Steven Pinker · Enlightenment Now, 2018
“Don't watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.”
Sam Levenson · attributed
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying.”
Robert Herrick · To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time, 1648; quoted by Keating
“Lose this day loitering, 'twill be the same story tomorrow, and the next more dilatory.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Faust
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Annie Dillard · The Writing Life, 1989
“Confine yourself to the present.”
Marcus Aurelius · Meditations
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Annie Dillard · The Writing Life, 1989
“Life must be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
Søren Kierkegaard · Journals, 1843
“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
Douglas Adams · The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 1979
“Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.”
Allen Saunders · Reader's Digest, January 1957
“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
Leo Tolstoy · War and Peace, 1869
“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.”
Bill Keane · Family Circus, widely attributed
“There is a day in summer when the long nights begin, and they begin because the sun has swung as far north as it will go.”
Rachel Carson · The Edge of the Sea
“Every summer has a story.”
John Grisham · Sycamore Row
“Lose an hour in the morning and you will be all day hunting for it.”
Richard Whately · "Apophthegms", 1854
“A year from now you may wish you had started today.”
Karen Lamb · widely attributed to Karen Lamb
