Time and Its Passage

We see which way the stream of time doth run And are enforc’d from our most quiet sphere By the rough torrent of occasion.

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, Brief as the lightning in the collied night, That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, And ere a man hath power to say, “Behold!” The jaws of darkness do devour it up: So quick bright things come to confusion.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; For now hath time made me his numbering clock: My thoughts are minutes.

When time is broke and no proportion kept! So is it in the music of men’s lives.

O! call back yesterday, bid time return.

We cannot hold mortality’s strong hand.

Spite of cormorant devouring Time.

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, And then thou must be damned perpetually! Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of Heaven, That time may cease, and midnight never come.

The world’s a bubble, and the life of man Less than a span.

Who then to frail mortality shall trust But limns on water, or but writes in dust.

Let the dozing soul remember, let the mind awake and revive by contemplating how our life goes by so swiftly and how our death comes near so silently; how quickly pleasure fades, and how when it is recalled it give us pain, how we seem always to think that times past must have been better than today.

But where are the snows of yesteryear? 2

For thogh we slepe, or wake, or rome, or ryde, Ay fleeth the tyme, it nyl no man abyde.

Ye, fare wel al the snow of ferne yere! 6

For tyme ylost may nought recovered be.

Time cancels young pain.

Today’s today. Tomorrow, we may be ourselves gone down the drain of Eternity.

The immortal Gods alone have neither age nor death! All other things almighty Time disquiets.

Let every man in mankind’s frailty Consider his last day; and let none Presume on his good fortune until he find Life, at his death, a memory without pain.

Time eases all things.

Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time.

A day lays low and lifts up again all human things.

Old age and the passage of time teach all things.

The days that are still to come are the wisest witnesses.