Time

Look not mournfully into the past; it comes not back again. Wisely improve the present; it is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear, and with a manly heart.

Beauty, wit, high birth, vigor of bone, desert in service, love, friendship, charity, are subjects all to envious and calumniating time.

Day follows on the murkiest night, and, when the time comes, the latest fruits will ripen.

Part with it as with money, sparing; pay no moment but in purchase of its worth: and what its worth ask death-beds; they can tell.

God is the only being who has time enough; but a prudent man, who knows how to seize occasion, can commonly make a shift to find as much as he needs.

Twenty ages sunk in eternal night. They are without movement, without light, and without noise.

Time is given us that we may take care for eternity; and eternity will not be too long to regret the loss of our time if we have misspent it.

Time is the greatest of all tyrants. All we go on towards age, he taxes our health, limbs, faculties, strength, and features.

Imitate time; it destroys everything slowly; it undermines, it wears away, it detaches, it does not wrench.

Observe a method in the distribution of your time. Every hour will then know its proper employment, and no time will be lost.

Time, the corrector when our judgments err, the test of truth and love; sole philosopher, for all besides are sophists.

Time is a blooming field; nature is ever teeming with life; and all is seed, and all is fruit.

If you could throw as an alms to those who would use it well the time that you fritter away, how many beggars would become rich!

Time, as a river, hath brought down to us what is more light and superficial, while things more solid and substantial have been immersed.

I never knew the old gentleman with the scythe and hour-glass bring anything but gray hairs, thin cheeks, and loss of teeth.

Nor do they speak properly who say that time consumeth all things; for time is not effective, nor are bodies destroyed by it.

Still on it creeps, each little moment at another’s heels, till hours, days, years, and ages are made up.

But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day and the race a life.

Time, to the nation as to the individual, is nothing absolute; its duration depends on the rate of thought and feeling.

Loitering slow, the future creepeth; arrow-swift, the present sweepeth; and motionless forever stands the past.

Nothing lies on our hands with such uneasiness as time. Wretched and thoughtless creatures! In the only place where covetousness were a virtue we turn prodigals.

There are no fragments so precious as those of time, and none are so heedlessly lost by people who cannot make a moment, and yet can waste years.

As nothing truly valuable can be attained without industry, so there can be no persevering industry without a deep sense of the value of time.

Time sheds a softness on remote objects or events, as local distance imparts to the landscape a smoothness and mellowness which disappear on a nearer approach.

We sleep, but the loom of life never stops; and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up to-morrow.

Opinions, theories, and systems pass by turns over the grindstone of time, which at first gives them brilliancy and sharpness, but finally wears them out.

A year! A life! What are they! The telling of a tale, the passing of a meteor, a dim speck seen for a moment on time’s horizon dropping into eternity.

Time is painted with a lock before, and bald behind, signifying thereby, that we must take time (as we say) by the forelock, for when it is once passed there is no recalling it.

Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever!

Make use of time, if thou valuest eternity. Yesterday cannot be recalled; to-morrow cannot be assured; to-day only is thine, which, if thou procrastinatest, thou losest; which loss is lost forever.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

Time, the cradle of hope, but the grave of ambition, is the stern corrector of fools, but the salutary counselor of the wise, bringing all they dread to the one, and all they desire to the other.

Know the true value of time; match, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination; never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day.

Time hurries on with a resistless, unremitting stream, yet treads more soft than e’er did midnight thief, that slides his hand under the miser’s pillow and carries off the prize.

Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth; and the lapse of more than two thousand years has not weakened the force of these wise words.

Time passes cold and indifferent over us; it knows nothing of our joys or sorrows; it leads us with ice-cold hand deeper and deeper into the labyrinth.

Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it, and, like the flash of the lightning, at once exists and expires.

God, who is liberal in all his other gifts, shows us, by the wise economy of His providence, how circumspect we ought to be in the management of our time, for He never gives us two moments together.

There is nothing of which we are apt to be so lavish as of time, and about which we ought to be more solicitous, since without it we can do nothing in this world. Time is what we want most, but what, alas! we use worst.

Time is like a ship which never anchors; while I am on board, I had better do those things that may profit me at my landing, than practice such as shall cause my commitment when I come ashore.

What is time? The shadow on the dial, the striking of the clock, the running of the sand—day and night, summer and winter, months, years, centuries—these are but arbitrary and outward signs, the measure of time, not time itself. Time is the life of the soul.

Our lives are either spent in doing nothing at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in doing nothing that we ought to do. We are always complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end to them.

Our acts of kindness we reserve for our friends, our bounties for our dependants, our riches for our children and relations, our praises for those who appear worthy of them, our time we give all to the world; we expose it, I may say, a prey to all mankind.

If time, like money, could be laid by while one was not using it, there might be some excuse for the idleness of half the world, but yet not a full one. For even this would be such an economy as the living on a principal sum, without making it purchase interest.

Observe a method in the distribution of your time. Every hour will then know its proper employment, and no time will be lost. Idleness will be shut out at every avenue, and with her that numerous body of vices that make up her train.

The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depends upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance—and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.

Time is but a 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. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper, fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.

Time is scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm; we who smite like the scythe. It is ourselves who abolish, ourselves who consume; we are the mildew and the flame, and the soul of man is to its own work as the moth that frets when it cannot fly, and as the hidden flame that blasts where it cannot illumine.

Time sadly overcometh all things, and is now dominant, and sitteth upon a sphinx, and looketh unto Memphis and old Thebes, while his sister Oblivion reclineth semi-somnous on a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, making puzzles of Titanian erections, and turning old glories into dreams.

Alas! it is not till Time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life to light the fires of human passion with, from day to day, that man begins to see that the leaves which remain are few in number.

Think not thy time short in this world, since the world itself is not long. The created world is but a small parenthesis in eternity, and a short interposition, for a time, between such a state of duration as was before it and may be after it.

That great mystery of time, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, 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.

The best general means to insure the profitable employment of our time is to accustom ourselves to living in continual dependence upon the Spirit of God and His law, receiving, every instant, whatever He is pleased to bestow; consulting Him in every emergency requiring instant action, and having recourse to Him in our weaker moments when virtue seems to fail.

In the spirit of faith let us begin each day, and we shall be sure to “redeem the time” which it brings to us, by changing it into something definite and eternal. There is a deep meaning in this phrase of the apostle, to redeem time. We redeem time, and do not merely use it. We transform it into eternity by living it aright.

The time which passes over our heads so imperceptibly makes the same gradual change in habits, manners and character as in personal appearance. At the revolution of every five years we find ourselves another and yet the same—there is a change of views and no less of the light in which we regard them; a change of motives as well as of action.

If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality, since lost time is never found again; and what we call time enough always proves little enough. Let us then be up and doing, and doing to the purpose; so by diligence shall we do more with less perplexity.

How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert an atom—in graceful succession, in equal fullness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unraveled, nor shown.

Time is the most subtle yet the most insatiable of depredators, and by appearing to take nothing is permitted to take all; nor can it be satisfied until it has stolen the world from us, and us from the world. It constantly flies, yet overcomes all things by flight; and although it is the present ally, it will be the future conqueror of death.

The hours of a wise man are lengthened by his ideas, as those of a fool are by his passions. The time of the one is long, because he does not know what to do with it; so is that of the other, because he distinguishes every moment of it with useful or amusing thoughts—or, in other words, because the one is always wishing it away, and the other always enjoying it.

He who cannot find time to consult his Bible will one day find he has time to be sick; he who has no time to pray must find time to die; he who can find no time to reflect is most likely to find time to sin; he who cannot find time for repentance will find an eternity in which repentance will be of no avail; he who cannot find time to work for others may find an eternity in which to suffer for himself.

There is nothing that we can properly call our own but our time, and yet everybody fools us out of it who has a mind to do it. If a man borrows a paltry sum of money, there must needs be bonds and securities, and every common civility is presently charged upon account. But he who has my time thinks he owes me nothing for it, though it be a debt that gratitude itself can never repay.

Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions; the surest poison is time. This cup which nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds power, fills us with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science; especially it creates a craving for larger draughts of itself.

Time is never more misspent than while we declaim against the want of it; all our actions are then tinctured with peevishness. The yoke of life is certainly the least oppressive when we carry it with good-humor; and in the shades of rural retirement, when we have once acquired a resolution to pass our hours with economy, sorrowful lamentations on the subject of time misspent and business neglected never torture the mind.

To-day, to-morrow, every day, to thousands the end of the world is close at hand. And why should we fear it? We walk here, as it were, in the crypts of life; at times, from the great cathedral above us, we can hear the organ and the chanting choir; we see the light stream through the open door, when some friend goes up before us; and shall we fear to mount the narrow staircase of the grave that leads us out of this uncertain twilight into life eternal?