Insightful quotes on Time

Time is a dream ... a destroying dream;
It lays great cities in dust, it fills the seas;
It covers the face of beauty, and tumbles walls.
CONRAD AIKEN

The universe may be timeless, but if you imagine breaking it into pieces, some of the pieces can serve as clocks for the others. Time emerges from timelessness. We perceive time because we are, by our very nature, one of those pieces.
CRAIG CALLENDER

We are the fools of Time and Terror:
DaysSteal on us, and steal from us; yet we live,
Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.
LORD BYRON

Day by day Time rolls the scroll of Life,
Yet man heeds not in worldly strife
The vanished years, till Death demands his claim--
The mound-lines of the clay that mark his name.
HARRIET MAXWELL CONVERSE

We grasp at Time, but cannot hold
One minute of his treasured hour;
He tarries not, though oft we pray
That he will rest in youth's bright bower.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON

Old Time, in whose banks we deposit our notes
Is a miser who always wants guineas for groats;
He keeps all his customers still in arrears
By lending them minutes and charging them years.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present.
LEONARDO DA VINCI

There is a balance, a kind of standoff between the time continuum and the human entity, our frail bundle of soma and psyche. We eventually succumb to time, it's true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going. Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second.... We were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time.
DON DELILLO

Time, the cradle of hope.... Wisdom walks before it, opportunity with it, and repentance behind it: he that has made it his friend will have little to fear from his enemies, but he that has made it his enemy will have little to hope from his friends.
Charles Caleb Colton

How rapidly time urges his flight; sometimes as a relentless, unsparing destroyer; but oftener as a swift-winged and beautiful angel; changing, yet not taking away this world's blessings: making our past sorrows look dim in the distance; opening many flowers of pleasure on our way, and gradually ripening our souls for the great eternity.
WILLIAM CHAMBERS