...we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless -paul bowles. (see below for more.)
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
-T.S. Eliot
Day, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.
-Ambrose Bierce
We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us.
-Charles Baudelaire
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
-Carl Sandburg
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
-Groucho Marx
Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
-Jorge Luis Borge
Time is the longest distance between two places.
-Tennessee Williams
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.
-Saint Augustine
Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.
-Thomas Mann
Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
-William Faulkner
Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse
Without a rider on a road at night.
The mind sits listening and hears it pass.
-Wallace Stevens
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
-Marcel Proust
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.
-Douglas Adams
Sweet childish days, that were as long, As twenty days are now.
-William Wordsworth
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.
-T.S. Eliot
Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.
-Goethe
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.
-Albert Einstein
Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible, and divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A door is to be painted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood, or oil, or meal, or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax; and an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains; and the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word,—these eat up the hours.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Time needs another minute.
-Sly Stone
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
-Jack London
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
-Bertrand Russell
Regret for wasted time is more wasted time.
-Mason Cooley
Time is here and you’ll go his way.
Your lung is waiting in the death market.
Your face beside me will grow indifferent.
Darling, you will yield up your belly and be
cored like an apple.
-Anne Sexton
We die only once, and for such a long time.
-Moliere
Time has an undertaking establishment on every block and drives his coffin nails faster than the steam riveters rivet or the stenographers type or the tickers tick out fours and eights and dollar signs and ciphers.
-John Dos Passos
But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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all images from Henry G. Abbott’s The watch factories of America, past and present. A complete history of watchmaking in America, from 1809 to 1888 which is viewable at the smithsonian’s recently launched galaxy of images.