Time and Its Passage

The Road goes ever on and on

 

Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.

 

Let you hold in mind, girls, that your beauty must pass

 

I do not think we need trouble ourselves with the thought that my view depends upon differences of degree. The whole law does so as soon as it is civilized. . . . Negligence is all degree—that of the defendant here degree of the nicest sort; and between the variations according to distance that I suppose to exist and the simple universality of the rules in the Twelve Tables of the Leges Barbarorum, there lies the culture of two thousand years.

 

[I]t is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder.

Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the use of finite creatures.

Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a Way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.

Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

Life is a frail moth flying / Caught in the web of the years that pass.

Hell is the bloodcurdling mansion of time, in whose profoundest circle Satan himself waits, winding a gargantuan watch in his hand.

Even though a god, I have learned to obey the times.

Till last by Philip's farm I flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on forever.

The Future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

Each life makes its own imitation of immortality.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. J. R. R.

 

The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.

 

The present is the point at which time touches eternity.

 

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.

I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.

 

Forward, forward let us range,

 

For though from out our bourne of time and place

 

For men may come and men may go,

 

And here face downward in the sun To feel how swift how secretly The shadow of the night comes on.

 

Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion.