Thought-provoking and Inspiring Time Quotes
Last Updated on 19/05/2025
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Explore thought-provoking and inspiring time quotes that will make you contemplate about its existence and how differently everyone perceives it or deals with it.
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What is time?
There are many definitions and categories of time. Standard, local, universal, cosmic, linear, circular, spiral, absolute, residual, proper, historical, ancient, and modern. Sciences, like physics, still have questions about time unanswered and we can’t have a common perception of it.
Moreover, there is the division of time into objective and subjective. According to Zakay & Hornic (1991), subjective time is influenced by thoughts, feelings, memories, and expectations of activities. In other words, the duration of an experience can be perceived differently by each of us. And, this perception is unique, like our fingertips (Zimbardo & Boyd, 2012).
In their book, The Time Paradox: Using the new psychology of time for your advantage, Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd suggest that the way we perceive time looks like the way fishes may “understand” water. Its presence is perceived by its absence. What an excellent metaphor! James Joyce expressed the same notion in his book A portrait of the artist as a young man. He said that absence is the highest form of presence.
Thought-provoking and Inspiring Time Quotes
Understanding time as you want or, at least, as your brain can perceive it seems to be like all other characteristics and preferences that you have. And, I guess that’s why we have so many contradictive quotes about time. Here are some thought-provoking quotes about time.
Time Is Quotes
“Time is an illusion.” – Albert Einstein
“What then is time? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I do not know.” – St. Augustine
“Time is the longest distance between two places.” – Tennessee Williams
“Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.” – Ray Cummings
“Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.” – Lao Tzu
“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.” – William Penn
“Time is the wisest counselor of all.” – Pericles
How Time Flies
“Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Time flies. It’s up to you to be the navigator.” – Robert Orben
“How did it get so late so soon?” – Dr. Seuss
“Life is too short to waste your time on people who don’t respect, appreciate, and value you.” – Roy T. Bennett
Make Time for What You Want
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien
“Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”
– Milan Kundera
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?” That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.”
– Hermann Hesse
“Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”
– Jean-Paul Sartre
“Enjoy life. There’s plenty of time to be dead.”
– Hans Christian Andersen
“The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.”
– Leo Tolstoy
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