117 Inspiring And Thoughtful Time Quotes

Time, an ever-fleeting yet profound element of our lives, has inspired thinkers, poets, and leaders throughout history to ponder its mysteries. In our fast-paced world, where every second seems to evaporate in the blink of an eye, reflecting on the nature of time can offer us invaluable insights into our experiences, priorities, and aspirations. This collection of 117 inspiring and thoughtful time quotes invites you to pause, reflect, and appreciate the passage of time. Whether you are seeking motivation, solace, or a deeper understanding of life's temporal dimension, these quotes provide a tapestry of wisdom that transcends the ages. Join us on this journey through words to discover how time, both relentless and gentle, shapes our existence in profound ways.

1. “Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life. ” - Norton Juster

2. “First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.” - Virginia Woolf

3. “Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.” - Kurt Vonnegut

4. “They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” - Andy Warhol

5. “If time be judiciously employed, there is time for everything.” - George Head

6. “I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo."So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

7. “Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it.” - Moses Hadas

8. “There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” - T.S. Eliot

9. “We must use time creatively - and forever realize that the time is always hope to do great things.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

10. “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.” - Horace Mann

11. “The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.” - C.S. Lewis

12. “Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.” - Graham Greene

13. “I wanted to go on sitting there, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time, because we were peaceful all of us, we were content and drowsy even as the bee who droned above our heads. In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again. Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die, the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched. Here we sat together, Maxim and I, hand-in-hand, and the past and the future mattered not at all. This was secure, this funny little fragment of time he would never remember, never think about again…For them it was just after lunch, quarter-past-three on a haphazard afternoon, like any hour, like any day. They did not want to hold it close, imprisoned and secure, as I did. They were not afraid.” - Daphne du Maurier

14. “O tempo, o tempo, o tempo e suas águas inflamáveis, esse rio largo que não cansa de correr, lento e sinuoso, ele próprio reconhecendo seus caminhos, recolhendo e filtrando de vária direção o caldo turvo dos afluentes e o sangue ruivo de outros canais para com eles construir a razão mística da história...” - Raduan Nassar

15. “The last thing the hockey ball symbolized was Time itself, the unstoppability of it, the way we're chained to our bodies, which are chained to Time.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

16. “I'm afraid of time... I mean, I'm afraid of not having enough time. Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I'm afraid of the quick judgements or mistakes everybody makes. You can't fix them without time. I'm afraid of seeing snapshots, not movies.” - Ann Brashares

17. “I must reluctantly observe that two causes, the abbreviation of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.” - Edward Gibbon

18. “Time itself is created through deeds of true kindness.” - Dara Horn

19. “To His Coy MistressHad we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood, And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires and more slow; An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest; An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart. For, lady, you deserve this state, Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust; The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapped power. Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.” - Andrew Marvell

20. “Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.” - Haruki Murakami

21. “It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.” - W.G. Sebald

22. “Time is like a river flowing endlessly through the universe. And if you poled your flatboat in that river you might fight your way against the current and travel upstream into the past. Or go with the flow and rush into the future. This was in a less cynical time before toxic waste dumping and pollution filled the waterway of Chronus with the detritus of empty hours wasted minutes years of repetition and time that has been killed.” - Harlan Ellison

23. “Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.” - John Muir

24. “God schedules a birthday, not man.” - Robert A. Bradley

25. “Time is funny lately, nothing to do with clocks.” - Victor Lodato

26. “She was never going to seek gainful employment again, that was for certain. She'd remain outside the public sector. She'd be an anarchist, she'd travel with jaguars. She was going to train herself to be totally irrational. She'd fall in love with a totally inappropriate person. She'd really work on it, but abandon would be involved as well. She'd have different names, a.k.a. Snake, a.k.a. Snow - no that was juvenile. She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter.” - Joy Williams

27. “You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject...Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize)... this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire.The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other... In this moment, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled... A moment of affirmation; for a certain time, though a finite one, a deranged interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction).” - Roland Barthes

28. “Time is, in fact, a cross to bear, it passes on inexorably and remorselessly, destroying everything in its wake, save art and works of the intellect.” - Jack Schmitt

29. “If you don't write when you don't have time for it, you won't write when you do have time for it.” - Katerina Stoykova Klemer

30. “Time plays tricks between here and home," said Mogget sepulchrally, frightening the life out of the telephone operator.” - Garth Nix

31. “Everything changed the day she figured out there was exactly enough time for the important things in her life.” - Brian Andreas

32. “The friend of time doesn't spend all day saying: 'I haven't got time.' He doesn't fight with time. He accepts it and cherishes it.” - Jean Vanier

33. “There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again.” - Bob Dylan

34. “ I'd Better Not-- A man leaned over to a man in a pubAnd said in a voice‘I used to be thirty seven but now I’m fifty one’.And that’s how the years go.In handfuls.Like somebody is almost at the end of a bag of crispsAnd they tip the bag upAnd it’s as though they’re drinking crisps.That’s how the years go.” - Ian McMillan

35. “Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.Lies 2: Time is a straight line.Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not.Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time.Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves...)Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon.Lies 7: Reality is truth.” - Jeanette Winterson

36. “They have gone. And the tunnel is about to close. So, boys, I am looking for someone to blame.” - Eoin Colfer

37. “He noticed Miss Bettie was wearing a watch, a steel Rolex with diamond chips. "What time is it?" he asked. Miss Bettie glanced at him and laughed. "You do seem to have difficulty remembering, don't you? Well, then, I shall tell you. It's now, Joshua Cane. Always and only now.” - Sean Stewart

38. “But time has a way of stealthily deciding a person’s mind without her conscious knowledge, and as she studied and procrastinated, Poison found one day that she had come to know her choice.” - Chris Wooding

39. “Still men be clever and in an hundred centuries or more, perchance will have found a way to journey thither; when that they have discovered and understood all things on the earth. What will a man be like in the xxvii century, or even the xx? Very like unto us, I do expect; I do not think that man’s nature shall change; nor do I anticipate that he will be the wiser than we, for all his learning, for ‘tis a part of that nature which is ours that we do not heed the lessons of history: neither our own, nor the world’s.” - Chico Kidd

40. “O words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away” - John Clare

41. “The Clock on the Morning Lenape BuildingMust Clocks be circles?Time is not a circle.Suppose the Mother of All Minutes startedright here, on the sidewalkin front of the Morning Lenape Building, and the paradeof minutes that followed--each of them, say, one inch long--headed out that way, down Bridge Street.Where would Now be? This minute?Out past the moon?Jupiter?The nearest star?Who came up with minutes, anyway?Who needs them?Name one good thing a minute's ever done.They shorten fun and measure misery.Get rid of them, I say.Down with minutes!And while you're at it--take hourswith you too. Don't get me startedon them.Clocks--that's the problem.Every clock is a nest of minutes and hours.Clocks strap us into their shape.Instead of heading for the nearest star, all we dois corkscrew.Clocks lock us into minutes, make Ferris wheel riders of us all, lug us round and roundfrom number to number,dice the time of our lives into tiny bitsuntil the bits are all we knowand the only question we care to ask is"What time is it?"As if minutes could tell.As if Arnold could look up at this clock onthe Lenape Building and read:15 Minutes till Found.As if Charlie's time is not forever stuckon Half Past Grace.As if a swarm of stinging minutes waits for Betty Lou to step outside.As if love does not tell all the time the Huffelmeyersneed to know.” - Jerry Spinelli

42. “Our mind has its own ideal time, which is no other but the consciousness of the progressive development of our beings.” - August Wilhelm Schlegel

43. “Listen to the time as it can heal everything.” - Sorin Cerin

44. “Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.” - M. Scott Peck

45. “They say time will make all this go away. But it's time that's taken my tomorrow, and turned them into yesterday.” - Ben Harper

46. “The future is a split second away.” - Ana Monnar

47. “Smartass Disciple: Which one was first created, time or things?Master of Stupidity: No things, no changes. No changes, no time.” - Toba Beta

48. “-'What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this?'There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter” - P. G. Wodehouse

49. “Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster.” - Douglas Coupland

50. “No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.” - Wallace Stegner

51. “The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.” - Milan Kundera

52. “عشق ورزی چون رقص است.انسان همیشه دیگری را همراه خود میکشاند.” - میلان کوندرا

53. “There's no advantage to hurrying through life." -Shikamaru Nara” - Masashi Kishimoto

54. “From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered, I learned that time cannot be spent. It can only be squandered.” - Roman Payne

55. “Nothing endures but change.” - Heraclitus

56. “L’arbre tombe feuille à feuille : si les hommes contemplaient chaque matin ce qu’ils ont perdu la veille, ils s’apercevraient bien de leur pauvreté.” - Chateaubriand

57. “I care not that this moment’s lot was thin and sparsely dealt; all pleasures sweet can be forgot the instant they are felt.” - Roman Payne

58. “There are two days in my calendar: This day and that Day.” - Martin Luther

59. “You can’t buy time, Nick. Ever. It’s the only thing in life you can’t get most of, and it’s the one thing that will mercilessly tear you up when it’s gone. It takes no pity on no soul and no heart.” - Sherrilyn Kenyon

60. “Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.” - Jennifer Egan

61. “The most important thing I learnt on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When any Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.” - Kurt Vonnegut

62. “By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.” - Carl Sagan

63. “She would fain have caught at the skirts of that departing time, and prayed it to return, and give her back what she had too little valued while it was yet in her possession. What a vain show Life seemed! How unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting! It was as if from some aerial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, ‘All are shadows!—all are passing!—all is past!” - Elizabeth Gaskell

64. “The full moon symbol on my calendar no longer seemed to be a period marking the end of something, but just another way of counting time.” - Charlaine Harris

65. “They keep track of time. Sometimes things happen and you feel that you need to mark them down.” - Scott O'Connor

66. “‎No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.” - Salman Rushdie

67. “If today you don't have time for those who gave all their time for you yesterday then tomorrow they will not have time to give to you who has no time today” - Amit Abraham

68. “Odysseus inclines his head. "True. But fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another." He spread his broad hands. "We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows?" He smiles. "Perhaps one day even I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you.” - Madeline Miller

69. “It had to do with the way women throughout time has known the feel of love when it came to them.” - Peg Sutherland

70. “They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite” - Cassandra Clare

71. “There is only now. And look! How rich we are in it.” - Vanna Bonta

72. “I saw a news report recently that measured average video game use by American men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five: twenty hours per week. Do you mean the flower of America's masculinity can't think of anything more important to do with twenty hours a week than sit in front of a video screen? Folks, this ain't normal. Can't we unplug already?” - Joel Salatin

73. “And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it's the opposite, obviously. But I don't think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal you a good card.” - Sebastian Faulks

74. “In the darkness of night,Demons strut, taunting, goading.In the light of day,Angels sing glorious songs.In the time in between,We live our lives alone and searching.And sometimes, softly,You understand damnation.All is forgotten, all is lost,All but forgivenessAnd the memory of her kiss.” - Lisa Mangum

75. “I can see,’ Miss Emily said, ‘that it might look as though you were simply pawns in a game. It can certainly be looked at like that. But think of it. You were lucky pawns. There was a certain climate and now it’s gone. You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in the world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.’‘It might be just some trend that came and went,’ I said. ‘But for us, it’s our life.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

76. “It is early, early morning. It's that time when it's still dark but you know the day is coming. Blue is bleeding through black. Stars are dying.” - Markus Zusak

77. “It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is” - W.B. Yeats

78. “The worst pain ... isn't the pain you feel at the time, it's the pain you feel later on when there's nothing you can do about it, They say that time heals all wounds, But we never live long enough to test that theory ...” - José Saramago

79. “History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.” - Julian Barnes

80. “Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

81. “Contemplation is a luxury, requiring time and alternatives.” - Tahir Shah

82. “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away; They fly forgotten, as a dream Dies at the opening day.” - Isaac Watts

83. “It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that 'history' had so far denied him—the winning of a democratic election.” - Christopher Hitchens

84. “In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn't it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.” - Stephen King

85. “Time cures you first, and then it kills you.” - Barbara Kingsolver

86. “Time turns our lies into truths.” - Gene Wolfe

87. “We move through time like a man in a rowboat, looking back even as we move forward.” - William Landay

88. “Your goals and dreams will never happen if you don't Sow Labor Into Time” - Brenda Johnson Padgitt

89. “Time is 'to make'. it is not 'to have'.” - Hiroko Sakai

90. “فأنا بدون القراءة، قراءة أي شيء، شأني شأن مدمن لا يجد سيجارة. لا أعرف كيف أنسى الوقت وأجعله غير مسموع في انتظام قلبي ونفسي.” - عباس بيضون

91. “If you keep waiting for the right time, it may never happen. Sometimes you have to make the most of the time you have.” - Priya Ardis

92. “One's perception of time was relative to one's desire for its passage.” - Beth Fantaskey

93. “When you read the account of a murder - or, say, a fiction story based on murder - you usually begin with the murder itself. That's all wrong. The murder begins a long time beforehand. A murder is the culmination of a lot of different circumstances, all converging at a given moment at a given point. People are brought into it from different parts of the globe and for unforeseen reasons. [...] The murder itself is the end of the story. It's Zero Hour.”He paused.“It's Zero Hour now.” - Agatha Christie

94. “Today..passes as yesterday, today is passing by... Tomorrow shall become today and that too shall pass!” - Escapades

95. “Time is at once the most valuable and the most perishable of all our possessions.” - John Randolph

96. “But there is neither kindness nor cruelty in time, and events happen without consideration for those who have a preference.” - David Whiteland

97. “Does your reality match your expectations? If not it's time to change either your expectations or your reality.” - Steven Redhead

98. “In light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth, a life full of the most atrocious tortures on earth, will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel.” - Mother Teresa

99. “The time is now, the person is you; better your life and become a name to conjure with in this day and age.” - Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

100. “Los mortales se olvidan de advertir que el tiempo pasa.” - Jackson Pearce

101. “It seemed like all the way to tomorrow and over it to the days beyond.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

102. “…if a thing can be said to be, to exist, then such is the nature of these expansive times that this thing which is must suffer to be touched. Ours is a time of connection; the private, and we must accept this, and it’s a hard thing to accept, the private is gone. All must be touched. All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted. And if you’re thinking how awful these sentiments are, you are perfectly correct, these are awful times, but you must remember as well that this has always been the chiefest characteristic of the Present, to everyone living through it; always, throughout history, and so far as I can see for all the days and years to come until the sun and the stars fall down and the clocks have all ground themselves to expiry and the future has long long shaded away into Time Immemorial: the Present is always an awful place to be.” - Tony Kushner

103. “Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going?” - Tennessee Williams

104. “It is too late." The old man shook his head. "It is never too late or too soon. It is when it is supposed to be." He smiled. "There is a plan, Dor.” - Mitch Albom

105. “The most difficult thing about Time, I have learned, is doing it.” - Roger Zelazny

106. “She has no regrets; she knows now he could never have made her happy, even though he has, apparently, joined AA, is doing better. But sobriety is his journey, not hers; he needs to do it for himself, alone. Still, she misses him hugely, doesn't feel ready for another relationship yet. But as time passes, she hopes that she might be, eventually, with someone new, easier, kinder.” - Sarah Rayner

107. “Time is immaterial. It is immortal.Time never chose people to define their lives with it. That was humanity’s choice. That was when man gave Time the control of everything, and ceased to control it himself. Time never tires, but it ensures that it tires man. That’s how it controls humanity.It creates hopelessness for man.” - Umair Naeem

108. “But there is nothing enduring in the world, and therefore even joy in the second minute is already not as acute as in the first; in the third minute it becomes still weaker and finally merges unnoticeably with the usual condition of the soul, as a circle on the water, caused by the fall of a pebble, finally merges with the smooth surface.” - Nikolai Gogol

109. “If I Must GoIf I must go to heaven's endClimbing the ages like a stair,Be near me and forever bendWith the same eyes above me there;Time will fly past us like leaves flying,We shall not heed, for we shall beBeyond living, beyond dying,Knowing and known unchangeably.” - Sara Teasdale

110. “Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it!” - Winston Churchill

111. “Time itself is a thing, so it seems to me, that stands solidly like a fence of iron palings with its endless row of years; and we flow past like Gyoll, on our way to a sea from which we shall return only as rain.” - Gene Wolfe

112. “It feels like I am wasting time. I mean, that's always the case. My life doesn't add up to anything.” - David Levithan

113. “...what still blew them all away was time itself, the days and months and the years, oh yes, the years. They went faster than anything man had the capacity to invent, so fast that for a while they fooled you into thinking they were slow, and was there any crueler trick than that?” - Michael Koryta

114. “Old age. All the facial detail is visible; all the traces life has left there are to be seen. The face is furrowed, wrinkled, sagging, ravaged by time. But the eyes are bright and, if not young, then somehow transcend the time that otherwise marks the face. It is as though someone else is looking at us, from somewhere inside the face, where everything is different. One can hardly be closer to another human soul.” - Karl Ove Knausgård

115. “Of no distemper, of no blast he died, But fell like autumn fruit that mellowed long — Even wondered at, because he dropped no sooner. Fate seemed to wind him up for fourscore years, Yet freshly ran he on ten winters more; Till like a clock worn out with eating time, The wheels of weary life at last stood still.” - John Dryden

116. “Time flies when you grow fangs and fur.” - Dianna Hardy

117. “Because time does the job, dynamite can't touch. (Samuel Hamilton)” - John Steinbeck