Theme

Time

What passes, what repeats, and what a person does with the hours. Poets and philosophers keep arriving at the same surprise: it is already later than you think.

1. To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.William BlakeAuguries of Innocence
2. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river.Jorge Luis BorgesA New Refutation of Time
3. The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.Geoffrey ChaucerThe Parliament of Fowls
4. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’Winston ChurchillSpeech to the House of Commons
5. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.Charles DickensA Tale of Two Cities
6. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.EcclesiastesEcclesiastes
7. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.EcclesiastesEcclesiastes
8. April is the cruellest month.T. S. EliotThe Waste Land
9. The past is never dead. It’s not even past.William FaulknerRequiem for a Nun
10. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.F. Scott FitzgeraldThe Great Gatsby
11. You cannot step twice into the same river.HeraclitusFragment, reported by Plato and Plutarch
12. Pluck the day, trusting as little as possible in the next one.HoraceOdes
13. What happens to a dream deferred?Langston HughesHarlem
14. History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.James JoyceUlysses
15. If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.Isaac NewtonLetter to Robert Hooke
16. Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.George OrwellNineteen Eighty-Four
17. The drop hollows the stone not by force, but by falling often.OvidEpistulae ex Ponto
18. It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it.SenecaOn the Shortness of Life
19. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.William ShakespeareSonnet 18
20. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time.William ShakespeareMacbeth
21. The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.Nikola TeslaA remark on his contemporaries, often dated to his later interviews
22. The Child is father of the Man.William WordsworthMy Heart Leaps Up

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