Time and Its Passage

I could not prove that years had feet— Yet confident they run.

Years steal Fire from the mind as vigor from the limb.

Words are like leaves, some wither every year, And every year a younger race succeeds.

The innocent and the beautiful Have no enemy but time.

Time is the coin of your life. You spend it. Do not allow others to spend it for you.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.

Time will explain it all. He is a talker, and needs no questioning before he speaks.

Time is the reef upon which all of our frail mystic ships are wrecked.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

And what would it be to grow old? For, after a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.

Time and tide will wait for no man, saith the adage. But all men have to wait for time and tide.

Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

In the days when I went to work, I never once knew what I was doing. These days, I never work. Work does age one so.

Keep cool. It will be all gone a hundred years hence.

There’s no present. There’s only the immediate future and the recent past.

Time ripens all things; no man is born wise.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.

The illuminable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing oceantide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb, for we have no word to speak about it.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Timing is everything. There is a tide in the affairs of men which when taken at the flood leads on to fortune.

I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future.

Time is our most valuable asset, yet we tend to waste it, kill it, and spend it rather than invest it.

To fill the hour, and leave no crevice ... that is happiness.

Life is short, and the boulder against which one pushes with all one’s might moves from its spot only with long intermissions.