82 Inspiring Quotes About Time

Time, an elusive yet constant force, shapes our lives in ways we often overlook. Its passage can bring wisdom, healing, and endless opportunities, while also reminding us of the fleeting nature of our moments. To help you reflect on the value and beauty of time, we’ve curated a collection of 82 inspiring quotes. Whether you’re seeking motivation, comfort, or a fresh perspective, these timeless words from thinkers, artists, and leaders around the world will resonate with your journey. Read on to immerse yourself in the profound insights and timeless wisdom captured in these quotes about time.

1. “agar vaght ra talaf konid zamani fara miresad ke vaght shoma ra talaf mikonad.” - William Shakespeare

2. “Time is the longest distance between two places.” - Tennessee Williams

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

4. “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.” - Vladimir Nabokov

5. “Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.” - Stephen King

6. “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

7. “Time spent with a cat is never wasted.” - Colette

8. “If the whole world I once could seeOn free soil stand, with the people freeThen to the moment might I say,Linger awhile. . .so fair thou art.” - Goethe

9. “Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.” - Alan Lightman

10. “But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty themselves, and fill again. The moon is born, and dies, and is reborn. Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and of months, and of years.” - Madeleine L'Engle

11. “Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.” - Haruki Murakami

12. “Time did not compose her.” - Jane Austen

13. “Time will generally lessen the interest of every attachment not within the daily circle.” - Jane Austen

14. “O the joy of my spirit--it is uncaged--it darts like lightning!It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time,I will have thousands of globes and all time.” - Walt Whitman

15. “It has been a week since Ami died and this morning I woke suddenly hours before dawn, indeed the same hour as when my mother died. It was not a dream that woke me, but a thought. And with that thought I could swear I heard Ami's voice. But I am not frightened. I am joyous. Joyous with realization. For I cannot help but think what a lucky person I am. Imagine that in all the eons of time, in all the possible universes of which Dara speaks, of all the stars in the heavens, Ami and I came together for one brief and shining sliver of time. I stop. I think. Supposing in the grand infinity of this universe two particles of life, Ami and me, swirl endlessly like grains of sand in the oceans of the world -- how much of a chance is there for these two particles, these two grains of sand, to collide, to rest briefly together... at the same moment in time? That is what happened with Ami and me... this miracle of chance.” - Kathryn Lasky

16. “We all of us complain of the shortness of time, saith Seneca, and yet have much more than we know what to do with. Our lives, says he, are spent either 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 our days are few, and acting as though there would no end of them."- On the Right Use of Time” - Joseph Addison

17. “There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. Its hard to live in all those kinds of times. Easy to forget that you live in all of them.” - Robert Charles Wilson

18. “Everyday is one less day.” - Tom Ford

19. “Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.” - Jeanette Winterson

20. “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

21. “To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.” - Tennessee Williams

22. “No, what numbed these fields, peopled with bad dreams was not the oppressive grip of a plague but rather an ailing retreat, a sort of sad widowhood. Man had started to subdue these vacant expanses, then had grown weary of eating into it, and now even the desire to preserve what had been claimed had perished. He had established everywhere an ebb, a sorrowful withdrawal. His cuttings into the forest, which were seen at long intervals, had lost their hard edges, their distinct notches: now a thick brushwood had driven its sabbath into the broad daylight of the glades, hiding the naked trunks as high as their lowest branches.” - Julien Gracq

23. “You see, Valentin, there is no such thing as time. It's just a road, a path to travel on. Most of the world is on a train, traveling forward all the time, speeding toward death, with a set schedule and someone else in charge.” - Daniel Nayeri

24. “Just 'cause there's snow on the roof doesn't mean there's not a fire inside.” - Bonnie Hunt

25. “There is no necessity to live by the clock.” - Patricia Clapp

26. “The pathway traced with blood and tears,and dust of all our father's dead,Whose backward footsteps, wandering, red,Fade to the mist of nameless years.(“The Testimony of the Suns”)” - George Sterling

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

28. “Time has no dominion over love. Love is the one thing that transcends time. (Bones)” - Jeaniene Frost

29. “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

30. “There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious. Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time; to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year.” - Abraham Joshua Heschel

31. “I had a sneaking suspicion that time was not constant, but I guess I could never prove it. I suppose it didn’t really matter. I even had a theory that time didn’t go in straight line at all. I knew I was no Albert Einstein, but I had the sneaking suspicion that everything had happened, was happening, or would happen was really happening all the time. There was no past, present, and future. Everything was going on all at once and forever. If that was true, then each moment was eternity.” - Mark A Roeder

32. “Time is not the great teacher. Experience is. A man may live a whole life, but if he never leaves his home to experience that life, he dies knowing nothing. A mere child who has suffered and lived can be the wiser of the two.” - Lynsay Sands

33. “For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.” - Roland Barthes

34. “Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision” - John Ashbery

35. “I think I have many spenglerian moods about the country, and that some day people will look back and think 'this was a really goofy, unadmirable stupid time.” - Dick Cavett

36. “I got tired of feeling like Dracula. I wanted to see some daylight, and not just at six o’clock in the morning.” - Kate Moss

37. “Deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen or heard.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

38. “Four days will quickly steep themselves in nights; Four nights will quickly dream away the time; And then the moon, like to a silver bow new bent in heaven, shall behold the night of our solemnities.” - William Shakespeare

39. “I'll come and make love to you at five o'clock. If I'm late start without me.” - Tallulah Bankhead

40. “When my eyes meet his gaze as we're sitting here staring at each other, time stops. Those eyes are piercing mine, and I can swear at this moment he senses the real me. The one without the attitude, without the facade[...]” - Simone Elkeles

41. “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

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

43. “It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. ... The life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.” - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

44. “You don't have time, Len. That is the most bitter and the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. If you don't have what you want now, you don't have what you want.” - Ann Brashares

45. “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

46. “Tell me something. Do you believe in God?'Snow darted an apprehensive glance in my direction. 'What? Who still believes nowadays?''It isn't that simple. I don't mean the traditional God of Earth religion. I'm no expert in the history of religions, and perhaps this is nothing new--do you happen to know if there was ever a belief in an...imperfect God?''What do you mean by imperfect?' Snow frowned. 'In a way all the gods of the old religions were imperfect, considered that their attributes were amplified human ones. The God of the Old Testament, for instance, required humble submission and sacrifices, and and was jealous of other gods. The Greek gods had fits of sulks and family quarrels, and they were just as imperfect as mortals...''No,' I interrupted. 'I'm not thinking of a god whose imperfection arises out of the candor of his human creators, but one whose imperfection represents his essential characteristic: a god limited in his omniscience and power, fallible, incapable of foreseeing the consequences of his acts, and creating things that lead to horror. He is a...sick god, whose ambitions exceed his powers and who does not realize it at first. A god who has created clocks, but not the time they measure. He has created systems or mechanisms that serves specific ends but have now overstepped and betrayed them. And he has created eternity, which was to have measured his power, and which measures his unending defeat.'Snow hesitated, but his attitude no longer showed any of the wary reserve of recent weeks:'There was Manicheanism...''Nothing at all to do with the principles of Good and Evil,' I broke in immediately. 'This god has no existence outside of matter. He would like to free himself from matter, but he cannot...'Snow pondered for a while:'I don't know of any religion that answers your description. That kind of religion has never been...necessary. If i understand you, and I'm afraid I do, what you have in mind is an evolving god, who develops in the course of time, grows, and keeps increasing in power while remaining aware of his powerlessness. For your god, the divine condition is a situation without a goal. And understanding that, he despairs. But isn't this despairing god of yours mankind, Kelvin? Is it man you are talking about, and that is a fallacy, not just philosophically but also mystically speaking.'I kept on:'No, it's nothing to do with man. man may correspond to my provisional definition from some point of view, but that is because the definition has a lot of gaps. Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. Man can serve is age or rebel against it, but the target of his cooperation or rebellion comes to him from outside. If there was only a since human being in existence, he would apparently be able to attempt the experiment of creating his own goals in complete freedom--apparently, because a man not brought up among other human beings cannot become a man. And the being--the being I have in mind--cannot exist in the plural, you see? ...Perhaps he has already been born somewhere, in some corner of the galaxy, and soon he will have some childish enthusiasm that will set him putting out one star and lighting another. We will notice him after a while...''We already have,' Snow said sarcastically. 'Novas and supernovas. According to you they are candles on his altar.''If you're going to take what I say literally...'...Snow asked abruptly:'What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?''I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose--a god who simply is.” - Stanisław Lem

47. “He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.” - Margaret Atwood

48. “And why does he talk so funny? Doesn't he mean squashed tomatoes?I don't think that they had tomatoes when he comes from, said Bod. And that's just how they talk then.” - Neil Gaiman

49. “Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time.” - Jennifer Egan

50. “The question 'What was there before creation?' is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.” - Glen Duncan

51. “It is still this moment and that will be true of every moment that follows, assuming this moment ever ends, which, if I am lucky, it won't.” - Justin Taylor

52. “You put your time where your priority is.” - Sebastian Faulks

53. “Until we can navigate in time, I'm not sure that we can prove that what happened is real.” - Sebastian Faulks

54. “Is that all time is - our perception of how quickly it does or does not pass?” - Douglas Coupland

55. “History overflows time. Love overflows the allowance of the world. All the vessels overflow, and no end or limit stays put. Every shakable thing has got to be shaken. In a sense, nothing that was ever lost in Port William ever has been replaced. In another sense, nothing is ever lost, and we are compacted together forever, even by our failures, our regrets, and our longings.” - Wendell Berry

56. “Usually time alters and affects everything, but when someone you love dies time cannot change that, no amount of time will ever change that, so time stops having any meaning.” - Rosamund Lupton

57. “They say you can't stop time, that it is a constant and waits for no one. The're wrong. Time slows when you want it to speed up. It goes too Fast when you're having fun. And it stops. It stops dead in its tracks, when the unthinkable occurs. Time is not neutral, it makes no sence, and it bears no logic. It has nothing to do with nature or fairness or physics. Time is cruel. And its as simple as that.” - Heather Killough-Walden

58. “Time stretches and calms, but still we reach, for we belonged then. We want to know. Sometimes that knowledge is painful, or inconvenient, or even damning. But it is essential. It exposes us for what we have been, and can be.” - Mark Mustian

59. “But life is just a party, and parties weren't meant to last.” - Prince

60. “The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.” - Jorge Luis Borges

61. “When a traveler from the future must talk, he does not talk but whimpers. He whispers tortured sounds. He is agonized. For if he makes the slightest alteration in anything, he may destroy the future. At the same time, he is forced to witness events without being part of them, without changing them. He envies the people who live in their own time, who can act at will, oblivious of the future, ignorant of the effects of their actions. But he cannot act. He is an inert gas, a ghost, a sheet without soul. He has lost his personhood. He is an exile of time.” - Alan Lightman

62. “The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one casual and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available.” - Ted Chiang

63. “Most of us take for granted that time flies, meaning that it passes too quickly. But in the mindful state, time doesn't really pass at all. There is only a single instant of time that keeps renewing itself over and over with infinite variety.” - Deepak Chopra

64. “:D :D ...” - You

65. “So he sat and listened to pigeons talking, till it seemed to him they were trying to lull the restlessness of Earth, and thought that they might by drowsy incantation be putting some spell against time, through which it could not come to harm their nests; for the power of time was not made clear to him yet and he knew not yet that nothing in our fields has the strength to hold out against time.” - Lord Dunsany

66. “Art is long, and Time is fleeting,And our hearts, though stout and brave,Still, like muffled drums, are beatingFuneral marches to the grave.” - Longfellow

67. “The chief beauty about timeis that you cannot waste it in advance.The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you,as perfect, as unspoiled,as if you had never wasted or misapplieda single moment in all your life.You can turn over a new leaf every hourif you choose.” - Arnold Bennett

68. “... we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.” - Italo Calvino

69. “I was moved beyond words. The train ride over the mountains from lake Titticaca to Cusco reminded me of Africa where I grew up; and 4 days walking on the Inca Trail, then more in the jungle, just magnificent - time, space, and splendour. Our planet is superb!” - jay woodman

70. “Which of us is not saying to himself--which of us has not been saying to himself all his life: "I shall alter that when I have a little more time"? We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.” - Arnold Bennett

71. “Next time!" In what calendar are kept the records of those next times which never come?” - Helen Hunt Jackson

72. “He really had experienced every tiniest increment of time in the four decades since then, and yet here he was surprised to be suddenly old and crippled. Turned out the rope didn't care if you noticed every daisy on the path to the gallows.” - Chris Cleave

73. “I can't destroy things so beautiful.""Time will destroy them if you don't. Time destroys everything. But if you destroy them, it will mean something.” - Neal Shusterman

74. “Time is the most precious gift you can give to someone, because if you give someone your time. It's a part of your life that you will never get back.” - Gloria Tesch

75. “It's my belief that people enter your life at exactly the right time.” - Don Roff

76. “He felt, and not for the first time today, that he had not made a good decision in his personal or professional life since 1989.” - Michael Chabon

77. “What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What "grace" might have enlightened me? except that of passing time, or of a good cause, encountered on my way?” - Roland Barthes

78. “When every minute of your day is planned & you are packed for days, you shall soon realize that the pain of past fades, vision of life gets clearer and all that seemed to poison your life Ceases to exist.” - Sujit Lalwani

79. “Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.” - Marcus Aurelius

80. “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

81. “Time is like the ocean; you can only hold a little in your hands.” - Josh Pyke

82. “Time is the ultimate democracy. Rich and poor, young and old, male and female: all have 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week.” - Elizabeth Grace Saunders