The Quotes canon
Sourced and curated.
Every quote has been curated by hand and carefully authenticated.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Thomas Mann2 quotes
Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century beings it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols. — Thomas Mann · 1924Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours. — Thomas Mann · 1924Albert Einstein1 quote
The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent. — Albert Einstein · 1955Alice Walker1 quote
Time moves slowly, but passes quickly. — Alice Walker · 1982Arthur Eddington1 quote
I shall use the phrase "time's arrow" to express this one way property of time which has no analogue in space. — Arthur Eddington · 1928Brand1 quote
Time is relative, okay? It can stretch and it can squeeze, but...it can't run backwards. Just can't. The only thing that can move across dimensions, like time, is gravity. — Brand · 2014C.S. Lewis1 quote
We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain—not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is. — C.S. Lewis · 1942Carl Sagan1 quote
We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever. — Carl Sagan · 1980Julian Barnes1 quote
We live in time—it holds us and molds us—but I've never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing—until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return. — Julian Barnes · 2011Navin Johnson1 quote
I know we've only known each other four weeks and three days, but to me it seems like nine weeks and five days. The first day seemed like a week and the second day seemed like five days. And the third day seemed like a week again and the fourth day seemed like eight days. And the fifth day you went to see your mother and that seemed just like a day, and then you came back and later on the sixth day, in the evening, when we saw each other, that started seeming like two days, so in the evening it seemed like two days spilling over into the next day and that started seeming like four days, so at the end of the sixth day on into the seventh day, it seemed like a total of five days. And the sixth day seemed like a week and a half. — Navin Johnson · 1979Ray Cummings1 quote
Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. — Ray Cummings · 1921Sir Walter Raleigh1 quote
Even such is time that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days.
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up, I trust! — Sir Walter Raleigh · 1618Virgil1 quote
Time is flying never to return. — Virgil · 29 BCWilliam James1 quote
Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming. — William James · 1890William Wordsworth1 quote
Sweet childish days, that were as long
As twenty days are now. — William Wordsworth · 1807