Time and Its Passage

Procrastination is the thief of time.

At thirty, a man suspects himself a fool; Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan; At fifty chides his infamous delay, Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve; In all the magnanimity of thought Resolves, and re-resolves; then dies the same.

Be wise today; ’tis madness to defer.

In records that defy the tooth of time.

Be wise with speed; A fool at forty is a fool indeed.

Not heaven itself upon the past has power; But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

Nothing is there to come, and nothing past, But an eternal now does always last.

The never-ending flight Of future days.

From morn To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer’s day; and with the setting sun Dropp’d from the zenith like a falling star.

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, Stol’n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year.

He that loves a rosy cheek, Or a coral lip admires, Or, from starlike eyes, doth seek Fuel to maintain his fires; As old Time makes these decay, So his flames must waste away.

Come my Celia, let us prove, While we can, the sports of love; Time will not be ours forever, He at length our good will sever. Spend not then his gifts in vain; Suns that set may rise again, But if once we lose this light, ’Tis with us perpetual night.

’Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s.

All Kings, and all their favorites, All glory of honors, beauties, wits, The sun itself, which makes times, as they pass, Is elder by a year, now, than it was When thou and I first one another saw: All other things, to their destruction draw, Only our love hath no decay; This, no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday, Running, it never runs from us away, But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

I have touch’d the highest point of all my greatness; And from that full meridian of my glory, I haste now to my setting: I shall fall Like a bright exhalation in the evening, And no man see me more.

There’s time enough for that.

He makes a July’s day short as December.

To me, fair friend, you never can be old, For as you were when first your eye I ey’d, Such seems your beauty still.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell.

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, That Time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death, which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced The rich proud cost of outworn buried age, When sometime lofty towers I see down-rased And brass eternal slave to mortal rage; When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main, Increasing store with loss and loss with store.

Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow.