24 English quotes

Quotes about time

Quotes about the past, the present, the future and how quickly time goes.

“Remember that time is money.”
– Benjamin Franklin, Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748)
Meaning: Time is valuable. Every hour you waste is an hour you could have used to earn or achieve something.
“Lost time is never found again.”
– Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack (1748)
Meaning: Once time has passed, you can never get it back, so use it well.
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
– J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)
Meaning: Gandalf tells Frodo that we can't choose the times we live in, but we can choose how we use our time.
“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
– Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869)
Meaning: Many problems are solved not by force but by waiting calmly and letting time do its work.
warriors
– fighters or soldiers
“Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”
– Marthe Troly-Curtin, Phrynette Married (1912)
Meaning: If you enjoyed it, the time wasn't really wasted. Relaxing and having fun have value too.
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”
– Seneca, On the Shortness of Life (c. 49)
Meaning: Life is long enough if we use it well. The problem is how much of it we waste.
“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.”
– William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude (1682)
Meaning: We always wish we had more time, yet we are careless with the time we do have.
“Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.”
– William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597)
Meaning: It is better to be very early than even a little late, because being late can ruin your chance.
“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”
– William Shakespeare, Richard II (c. 1595)
Meaning: King Richard, now in prison, realises that he wasted his time as king, and now time is destroying him in return.
doth
– an old form of "does"
waste
– (here) make weak and thin; destroy slowly
“Forever is composed of nows.”
– Emily Dickinson
Meaning: "Forever" is just a long line of present moments, so the present is all we really have.
composed of
– made of
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
– George Santayana, The Life of Reason (1905)
Meaning: If we don't learn from past mistakes, we will make the same mistakes again.
condemned
– forced to suffer something unpleasant
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
– L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)
Meaning: Life in the past was so different that it can feel as strange to us as a foreign land.
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
– William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (1951)
Meaning: Things that happened long ago still affect our lives and feelings today.
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
– Alan Kay
Meaning: Instead of guessing what will happen, create the future you want yourself.
predict
– say what will happen in the future
“Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.”
– Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive (1967)
Meaning: Time is the one resource you can't buy more of, so managing it well is the base of all other good management.
“The time is always right to do what is right.”
– Martin Luther King Jr., Speech at Oberlin College (1964)
Meaning: Don't wait for a better moment to do the right thing. Now is always the right time.
“Time is the longest distance between two places.”
– Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (1944)
Meaning: You can travel back to a place, but never back to a time. The years that separate us from the past are the hardest distance to cross.
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying.”
– Robert Herrick, "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" (1648)
Meaning: Enjoy life and its chances while you are young, because time passes quickly.
ye
– an old form of "you"
a-flying
– an old way to say "flying"; passing quickly
“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”
– Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies (1928)
Meaning: A butterfly lives only a short time but enjoys each moment fully. A life measured in happy moments is long enough.
“The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
– Albert Einstein, Letter to the family of Michele Besso (1955)
Meaning: Einstein, writing after a friend's death, suggests that in physics past, present and future are not truly separate, even though we feel they are.
distinction
– a clear difference
stubbornly persistent
– refusing to go away
illusion
– something that seems real but is not
“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
Meaning: A joke: after a serious-sounding idea about time, it adds that lunchtime is even less "real", because people stretch lunch breaks as long as they like.
doubly so
– twice as much
“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.”
– Mark Twain, "The Late Benjamin Franklin" (1870)
Meaning: A joke on the famous advice "Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today". Twain turns it into an excuse to delay things even longer.
put off
– delay; do later
“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.”
– Often attributed to Hector Berlioz
Meaning: A dark joke: we learn a lot as time passes, but by the time we are wise, our life is nearly over.
pupils
– students
“How did it get so late so soon?”
– Often attributed to Dr. Seuss
Meaning: Time passes faster than we expect. It is a common feeling at the end of a day, a year or a life.